In one of the busy seaport towns of our Pacific Coast Mr. Hadley sat at a little restaurant table, eating an inexpensive meal alone. Every cent that he and his wife possessed in the wide world had gone into that little fruit farm up in the hills, and now by means of a mortgage on it he had raised money enough to carry him back to the coast to take up the old heart-breaking task. His passage was already engaged on a steamer to sail for the Port the next day. Mrs. Hadley remained on the farm to carry on the work there as best she could alone.
If this were a model story, Clarence would most assuredly have gone with his old neighbor, but in real life people do not start on journeys unless they have the railroad or steamship fare, which Clarence did not have. It takes money to travel, and ordinary people cannot get money so easily that they can afford to spend it on anything that is not strictly necessary. Certainly Clarence wanted badly enough to go and show the way to Smugglers’ and search for his old playmates, but the best he could actually do was to make a map of the coast and San Moros as well as he could remember it, and give it to Mr. Hadley, with the name of the old Indian who had told him about Smugglers’ in the first place, but who, doubtless, had slept with his fathers for years now.
What did Mr. Hadley expect to find on Smugglers’? Certainly not his living children, for had they lived through the storm, even though the launch were disabled or destroyed, Pearson would have found some way to get back. No; it was only a confirmation of death which the father looked for at best, something to show where and how his children had perished,—some fragment of the launch, perhaps, all but buried in the sand.
As he sat eating, there came slowly into his consciousness a face at a table near him. He looked at it. Surely it had not been there when he came in. Whose was it? Why did it seem to claim his attention more than the dozen others on all sides? He tried to resume his meal, but—who was that man? where had he seen that face before?
In a blinding flash it came to him. It was Pearson! Pearson, the man whom Cunningham had sent with Marian and the children in the launch. But, of course, that could not be. Pearson was dead,—dead these nearly seven years ago,—but this fellow—
Just then the man looked up and met his gaze. It was the look of a complete stranger. Mr. Hadley politely dropped his eyes. But he did not drop his thinking, and so keenly conscious was he of that face that he knew instantly when the other rose from the table.
Mr. Hadley glanced up again. The other was leaving his dinner almost untouched. Mr. Hadley himself arose. His memory for faces was remarkably good; that man had Pearson’s face, he might be a brother; at any rate, he would speak to him; it could not be Pearson, but why was he leaving his dinner uneaten?
The man, who was sauntering out apparently without haste, glanced back and saw Mr. Hadley advancing toward him, and a look came over his face that Mr. Hadley did not mistake. In a flash he knew it was Pearson; impossible as it seemed, it was Pearson, and he was afraid!
A moment or two later a placid policeman just turning a corner was knocked nearly off his feet and out of his dignity by a man coming from the opposite direction, a man past middle age with white hair and flashing eyes.
“Officer,” he cried, grasping the representative of the law by the arm, “arrest that man! the one in brown with the striped coat!”