“I guess that was close!” he announced, as he mopped his face with a large handkerchief, and began fanning himself with a stained Panama hat. “Did the—the stuff get aboard all right at New York?”
The officer looked up, with a quick, cautious glance about him.
“The machinery is stowed away in the hold,” he announced.
“Good,” replied the newcomer, energetically. “That machinery must be safeguarded. It is required in the development of a country that needs developin’. Do I draw my usual stateroom? See the purser? Good!”
The tardy passenger was tall, a bit under six feet, but thin almost to emaciation. His face was keen, and might have been handsome except that the alertness was suggestive of the fox or the weasel—furtive rather than intelligent. The eyes were quick-seeing and roving; the nose, aquiline; the lips, thin. On them sat habitually a half-satirical smile. The man had black hair sprinkled with gray, yet he could not have been more than thirty-six or seven.
“I’ll just run in and see the purser,” he announced, with his tireless energy. Saxon, turning from the hatch, caught only a vanishing glimpse of a tall, flannel-clad figure disappearing into the doorway of the main saloon, as he himself went to his stateroom to freshen himself up for dinner.
As the painter emerged from his cabin a few minutes before the call of the dinner-bugle, the thin man was lounging against the rail further aft.
Saxon stood for a moment drinking in the grateful coolness that was creeping into the air with the freshening of the evening breeze.
The stranger saw him, and started. Then, he looked again, with the swift comprehensiveness that belonged to his keen eyes, and stepped modestly back into the protecting angle where he could himself be sheltered from view by the bulk of a tarpaulined life-boat. When Saxon turned and strolled aft, the man closely followed these movements, then went into his own cabin.
That evening, at dinner, the new passenger did not appear. He dined in his stateroom, but later, as Saxon lounged with his own thoughts on the deck, the tall American was never far away, though he kept always in the blackest shadow thrown by boats or superstructure on the moonlit deck. If Saxon turned suddenly, the other would flatten himself furtively and in evident alarm back into the blackness. He had the manner of a man who is hunted, and who has recognized a pursuer.