The lad hesitated. Finally, touched, or put upon his mettle by a seeming confidence, he set out, with the greenback in his pocket which Mr. Openshaw had given him. The latter, at this pause in their colloquy, was made aware that he was suffering keenly. He had exceeding self-control; his successes in life had sprung from it. But every mastered nerve in his body, having already undergone so much, and having so much to undergo, was humming like a beehive. He could not stand still. He wandered about, meeting few pedestrians, across Water Street, up Manning Street to Puddle Dock with its liberty pole, and again past the graveyard, lingering wherever he could command a view of the broad glorious anchorage, tragic with the exposed ribs of rotting ships. Into the happier neighborhoods near, he would not penetrate; this one had been happy too, when he was a child. There he saw but visions of greatness gone, of comfort broken, and an hour ago, could have laid his cheek to the old flaggings, and wept. But he had now a terrible just purpose, and for that he must save his strength.
He was at the landing later than Rodolfo, who sat in a white wherry ballasted with his purchases, the oars already in hand. Openshaw rested his cane on the gunwale, and stepped quietly into the stern; they backed out of the cramped spaces, and shot away. The surface of the harbor was dimpling, little by little, with the great hidden swirls of the turning tide; deceptively glassy between its deflected banks, it gleamed like the thin ice which forms in November, and over which boys send pebble after pebble, and laugh to hear them chirruping. But Rodolfo had learned long since how to cajole the fierce Piscataqua; and tacking artfully by St. John's Point, he labored through the end arch of the great bridge, and gained the blue highway beyond. A train thundered overhead. Two women in the footpath, leaning over the rail, stared fixedly at the little boat, and from one sensitive face to the other, and again at their contrasted attire. They were Rodolfo's neighbors, and pleased that he had fallen in with a gentleman.
The cruisers were not back within the hour, nor within three hours. The whole world was to change strangely for them both, meanwhile. The order of what Langdon Openshaw had intended to say and do came to naught, because what happens to happen is lord over the strongest human will. He had prepared his cunning questionings, as if to force his own fate, forgetting that the aggregation of outer circumstance which we call fate is itself an irresistible vortex; the trapper, and not the trapped. Up stream, by Frank's Fort, under a sapphire sky, while as yet little had been said, he found that his watch had run down, and he asked for the correct time. Rodolfo set him right from a cheap timepiece. As he handled it, there appeared, linked to the guard, an artistic bit of bronze, a tiny Renaissance figure, with bow and hound, the blown draperies minutely fair. Openshaw saw it, and the whole universe was not so manifest to him as that small ominous curio within it.