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It was the last straw. I sat on the stringpiece and wept with mortification. When I arose and went my way, the war was over, as far as I was concerned. It was that in fact, as it speedily appeared. The country which to-day, after thirty years of trial and bereavement, is still capable of the Dreyfus infamy, was not fit to hold what was its own.
A pull to windward on the mainsheet backed the big mainsail and drove the stern towards the dock, whereon a mob of naked brown men awaited the casting of shore lines. The starboard quarter grated against the piling, and the open stern windows overhung the stringpiece for a moment.
There was a dory tied up to the end of the dock; I don't know who owned it, but there it was. "Come on, jump in." I yells, and all hands piled in, and we shoved off; all in one motion almost, and by the time Argand's crowd got to the stringpiece we were a vessel length away, and pulling like homeward bound. "Lay to it." I kept saying to them.
Betty laid the Gem alongside the stringpiece, and Grace and Mollie, leaping out, soon had the boat fast. The ends of the ropes, which had been trailing from the deck cleats in the water, were found unfrayed. "They must have come untied!" said Grace. "Oh, it was my fault. I thought I had mastered those knots, but I must have tied the wrong kind." "Never mind," said Betty, gently.
At midnight I carried my raft down to the edge of the water, then leaving it there for use in case of a repulse, with my ironwood stick in my left hand and my revolver in the right, I marched down to the bridge, but fearing my upright figure might be seen, dark as it was, outlined against the sky, I stooped and crawled along the stringpiece of timber until within twenty feet of the large house at the end of the bridge.
It was all there the physical that the eye took in and the thoughts evoked and sent swarming to the brain, there to remain engraved until life and memory end. The bridge had no protection along the side save a simple stringpiece of timber. On the far side the houses rested nearly against the bridge entrance, forming a street, which I had to pass through.
The swimmers were overboard in the cool river with the first shadows of night; the Quartermaster, so old that he dyed his hair for fear he'd be superannuated, lowered his lean body hand over hand down a rope and sat by the hour on a stringpiece of the dock, with the water laving his hairy and tattooed old breast. The Red Un was forbidden the river.
As Lad tugged his burden beneath the stringpiece, the Master bent down and gripped the sodden wet shoulders of the constable. One none-too-gentle heave, and Wefers was lying in a panting and dripping heap on the clean dock. Lad, relieved of his heavy load, swam leisurely around to shore. It had been a delightfully thrilling day, thus far, for the collie. But he was just a bit tired.
Then the startled visitor realized that the gaily-hued frock, and sash, and bonnet, garbed a little girl of perhaps eight or nine years. Janice could not see her face. When she rose up from where she had been sitting and went along the shaking stringpiece of the dock, her back was still toward the shore.
Save the buildings immediately at your right and left, all the others are seen in profile, a contingency never reckoned on by their builders. The decoration is all piled on the front, as elaborate a design, often, as Palladio ever dreamt of, but at the side, every cornice and stringpiece stops as short as if it had been sawn off, and the whole side is a flat blank piece of brickwork.
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