The house was a wretchedly constructed, long-neglected building of
a type common to those old river towns that in their many years of
uselessness have lost all civic pride, and in their own resultant
squalor and filth have buried their self-respect. A dingy, scarcely
legible sign over the treacherous board walk, in front, by the sickly
light of a smoke-grimed kerosene lantern, announced that the place was a
hotel.

Dark as it was, the man at the window could see the river. The trees
that lined the bank opposite the town were mere ghostly shadows against
the gloomy masses of the low hills that rose from the water's edge,
indistinct, mysterious, and unreal, into the threatening sky. The higher
mountains that reared their crests beyond the hills were invisible. The
stream itself swept sullenly through the night,--a resistless flood of
dismal power, as if, turbid with wrecked souls, with the lost hopes and
ruined dreams of men, it was fit only to bear vessels freighted with
sorrow, misfortune, and despair.

The manner of the man at the window was as if some woeful spirit of the
melancholy scene were calling him. With head bowed, and face turned a
little to one side, he listened intently as one listens to voices that
are muffled and indistinct. He pressed his face close to the glass, and
with straining eyes tried to see more clearly the ghostly trees, the
sombre hills, and the gloomy river. Three times he turned from the
window to pace to and fro in the darkened room, and every time his steps
brought him again to the casement, as if in obedience to some insistent
voice that summoned him. The fourth time, he turned from the window more
quickly, with a gesture of assenting decision.

The crackling snap of a match broke the dead stillness. The sudden flare