Wolf in bed in Grandmamma's cottage, 'That's to drown YOU in,
my dears!' Not a lumbering black barge, with its cracked and blistered
side impending over them, but seemed to suck at the river with a
thirst for sucking them under. And everything so vaunted the spoiling
influences of water--discoloured copper, rotten wood, honey-combed
stone, green dank deposit--that the after-consequences of being crushed,
sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the
main event.

Some half-hour of this work, and Riderhood unshipped his sculls, stood
holding on to a barge, and hand over hand long-wise along the barge's
side gradually worked his boat under her head into a secret little
nook of scummy water. And driven into that nook, and wedged as he had
described, was Gaffer's boat; that boat with the stain still in it,
bearing some resemblance to a muffled human form.

'Now tell me I'm a liar!' said the honest man.

('With a morbid expectation,' murmured Eugene to Lightwood, 'that
somebody is always going to tell him the truth.')

'This is Hexam's boat,' said Mr Inspector. 'I know her well.'

'Look at the broken scull. Look at the t'other scull gone. NOW tell me I
am a liar!' said the honest man.

Mr Inspector stepped into the boat. Eugene and Mortimer looked on.

'And see now!' added Riderhood, creeping aft, and showing a stretched
rope made fast there and towing overboard. 'Didn't I tell you he was in
luck again?'

'Haul in,' said Mr Inspector.

'Easy to say haul in,' answered Riderhood. 'Not so easy done. His luck's
got fouled under the keels of the barges. I tried to haul in last time,
but I couldn't. See how taut the line is!'

'I must have it up,' said Mr Inspector. 'I am going to take this boat
ashore, and his luck along with it. Try easy now.'

He tried easy now; but the luck resisted; wouldn't come.

'I mean to have it, and the boat too,' said Mr Inspector, playing the
line.

But still the luck resisted; wouldn't come.

'Take care,' said Riderhood. 'You'll disfigure. Or pull asunder
perhaps.'

'I am not going to do either, not even to your Grandmother,' said Mr
Inspector; 'but I mean to have it. Come!' he added, at once persuasively
and with authority to the hidden object in the water, as he played the
line again; 'it's no good this sort of game, you know. You MUST come up.
I mean to have you.'

There was so much virtue in this distinctly and decidedly meaning to
have it, that it yie