There’s nothing to fear; he doesn’t know either of us.
If it is a face you have seen before;—if it is the one we are expecting to see, pull your necktie straight. It’s a little on one side.
These rather startling injunctions were read by George, with no very perceptible diminution of the uneasiness which it was only natural for him to feel at the oddity of his position. But only the demand last made produced any impression on him. The man they were waiting for was no further up than the second floor, but instinctively George’s hand had flown to his necktie, and he was only stopped from its premature re-arrangement by a warning look from Sweetwater.
“Not unless you know him,” whispered the detective; and immediately launched out into an easy talk about some totally different business which George neither understood, nor was expected to, I dare say.
Suddenly the steps below paused, and George heard Sweetwater draw in his breath in irrepressible dismay. But they were immediately resumed, and presently the head and shoulders of a workingman of uncommon proportions appeared in sight on the stairway.
George cast him a keen look, and his hand rose doubtfully to his neck and then fell back again. The approaching man was tall, very well-proportioned and easy of carriage; but the face—such of it as could be seen between his cap and the high collar he had pulled up about his ears, conveyed no exact impression to George’s mind, and he did not dare to give the signal Sweetwater expected from him. Yet as the man went by with a dark and sidelong glance at them both, he felt his hand rise again, though he did not complete the action, much to his own disgust and to the evident disappointment of the watchful detective.
“You’re not sure?” he now heard, oddly interpolated in the stream of half-whispered talk with which the other endeavoured to carry off the situation.
George shook his head. He could not rid himself of the old impression he had formed of the man in the snow.
“Mr. Dunn, a word with you,” suddenly spoke up Sweetwater, to the man who had just passed them. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that is my name,” was the quiet response, in a voice which was at once rich and resonant; a voice which George knew—the voice of the impassioned speaker he had heard resounding through the sleet as he cowered within hearing in the shed behind the Avenue A tenement. “Who are you who wish to speak to me at so late an hour?”