Page:Arthur Stringer - The Shadow.djvu/212

 loomed up closer in front of him. He could see her only in outline, at first, picked out here and there by a light. But there seemed something disheartening, something intimidating, in her very quietness, something suggestive of a plague-ship deserted by crew and passengers alike. That dark and silent hull at which he stared seemed to house untold possibilities of evil.

Yet Blake remembered that it also housed Binhart. And with that thought in his mind he no longer cared to hesitate. He rowed in under the shadowy counter, bumping about the rudder-post. Then he worked his way forward, feeling quietly along her side-plates, foot by foot.

He had more than half circled the ship before he came to her landing-ladder. The grilled platform at the bottom of this row of steps stood nearly as high as his shoulders, as though the ladder-end had been hauled up for the night.

Blake balanced himself on the bow of his surf -boat and tugged and strained until he