Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/27

 or two blocked his path ominously, but he skirted them, as a careful pilot skirts his channel-buoys. He did not care to run risks. He felt that he was still in the land of the enemy. He kept to the open, blindly and doggedly. He knew but one goal, and that goal lay beyond the Laminian's odorous gangplank. He fought his devious way towards it, like a spawning sock-eye fighting its way to a river source.

He hurried along the fog-wrapt cañons, still haunted by the impression of some unknown figure dogging his steps. He felt, as night and the fog deepened together, that the city was nothing more than a many-channeled river-bed, and that he waded along its bottom, breathing a new element, too thick for air, too etherealised for water. He saw streets that were new to him, streets where the misted globes of electric lights became an undulating double row of white tulips. Then he stumbled into Broadway. But it was a Broadway with the soft pedal on. Its roar of sound was so muffled he scarcely knew it. Then he came to a square where the scattered lamp-globes looked like bubbles of gold caught in tree-branches. Under these tree-branches he saw loungers on benches, mysterious and motionless figures, like broken rows of statuary, sleeping men in the final and casual attitudes of death. Above these figures he could see wet