“Just sounds like Acey Smith,” responded Hammond, “and I take it that what he told Holy Henry was just about the truth about himself.”
“Probably—probably,” reiterated the captain in an absent sort of a way as he fixed his gaze on the city wharves they were nearing. “But at the same time, I dunno. There’s a strange streak in that same Acey Smith. There’s things he’s done and does, on the quiet, that makes us older heads with the company admire him in spite of ourselves. But you can never get to know the Big Boss, no matter how long you’re around where he is. Just when you think you know him is the time he’s liable to do or say something so sudden and unexpected it will make your blood run cold. It strikes me while he’s talking to you with his tongue his mind is always busy thinking and plotting something else—thinking up plans maybe a year ahead.”
“This coming strike will likely give him lots of scope for thinking,” observed Hammond dryly.
“Oh, he won’t have so much to do with settling or breaking the strike,” declared the captain. “Them orders will come to Slack and him from their higher-ups.”
The skipper pressed a signal to the engine-room to slow down. They were swinging in to the city wharf.
III
Hammond alighted on the docks of Kam City and walked the streets expecting at any moment a blue-coated policeman or a plain-clothes detective would step forward and take him into custody in connection with the Gildersleeve disappearance. But no such thing happened. The very boldness of his entry must have set the sleuths of the law off guard, for at no time did he even find himself under suspicious scrutiny.
One thing at first absorbed his thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. That was the uncertainty of what might have happened to Josephine Stone. Where could she have gone from the island? The appearance of Acey Smith in the vicinity of the island alone in his motorboat made him the more uneasy. It all brought home to him a dark thought that he had all along been trying to fight off—that Josephine Stone some way or another must be entangled in the baffling mystery of the Nannabijou Limits. But, in spite of constantly rising perplexities, he refused to think of her in bitterness or that she had in any sense been consciously deceiving him. He would not believe that a woman such as she would give her lips to a man, as she had to him, either in spirit of coquetry or to further dark intrigue.
It was possible she had merely gone away in her motorboat for a trip along the lakeshore, or she might have come over to the city for the day. But there had been a deserted look about her cottage on the island that weighed in upon Hammond—made him feel that something else had happened. Anyway, he must hustle with the affairs he had come to the city to attend to, so that he could get back to the limits and find out for certain where she had gone.
Gold lettering on a window in the second storey of a business block across the street reminded him that he had mapped out a definite program for the day and that right here was where he must make his start. The sign marked the quarters of the American consul. There he would find the little grey man, Eulas Daly, the first on his mental list of interviews. He crossed the street and sought out the consul’s office.