“What is it, Horatio?” asked Maria, standing at the door of the first-class cabin with the baby in her arms.

“Nothing to alarm yourself about, my dear,” said Hornblower. “Compose yourself. This is no time for agitation.”

He turned and looked at the onehanded steersman, who bent down to examine Charlie; taking a hold of the breast of his coat with his steel hook he hauled up, but Charlie’s head only hung back helplessly, the blood running over his cheeks.

“Not much use out of Charlie,” said the steersman, letting him drop with a thump. As Hornblower stooped to look he could catch the reek of gin three feet from the bleeding mouth. Half stunned and half drunk—more than half of both for that matter.

“We’ve the tunnel to leg through,” said the steersman. “Who’s up at the Tunnel House?”

“Ne’er a soul,” replied the man with the horses. “The trade all went through in the early morning.”

The steersman whistled.

“You’ll have to come wi’ us,” he said.

“Not I,” said the householder. “I’ve sixteen horses—eighteen with these two. I can’t leave ‘em.”

The steersman swore a couple of astonishing oaths—astonishing even to Hornblower, who had heard many in his time.

“What d’you mean by ‘legging’ through the tunnel?” Hornblower allied.

The steersman pointed with his hook at the black, forbidding tunnel mouth in the castellated entrance.

“No towpath through the tunnel, o’ course, Captain,” he said. “So we leaves our horses here an’ we legs through. We puts a pair o’ ‘wings’ on the bows—sort o’ catheads, in a way. Charlie lies on one an’ I lies on the other, wi’ our heads inboard an’ our feet agin the tunnel wall. Then we sort o’ walks, and we gets the boat along that way, and we picks up another pair o’ horses at the south end.”