Without arranging his disordered hair or dress, he went up on deck, looking so wild and haggard that one of the deck hands remarked to another:
“That young fellow has been on a big drunk, and is paying for it now, you bet.”
Harcourt had no intention of stopping in Richmond. He was too well known in the Queen City of the South. He would go to the North, and lose his identity in some large town where he had never been before.
New York City offered the largest human wilderness in which to lose himself. He had never been there in his life, and had no acquaintances there except the Bushes and that Belial, Hanson. Hanson was away, and the Bushes would not be at all likely to discover him in changed identity.
He would go to New York by the first boat.
He declined the breakfast offered him by the steward, gathered his baggage and had it transferred to the New York boat, which was getting up steam to start on her northward voyage. He sat on the deck, staring off into vacancy, as the boat turned and steamed down the river.
“Young fellow getting over a long spree, I shouldn’t wonder,” remarked one passenger to another, as they noticed the pallid skin, haggard features and inflamed eyes of poor Harcourt.
He knew nothing of these comments, but sat there, gloomy and abstracted, until he was aroused by a voice near him.
“How do you do, sir?” it said.
He looked up, dazed by the sudden and familiar address from a stranger.