“And now,” continued Mr. Onslow, “I have a vague recollection of meeting him at the hotel where I stopped in Chicago last week.”
“Ah! if he is a Chicago man, I must be right in my estimate of him,” said Mrs. Berwick.
“Why so? Why should you be partial to Chicago?”
“Because my father was one of the first residents of the place.”
“What was his name?”
“Robert Aylesford.”
As she uttered this word they repassed the stranger. To their surprise he repeated, in a tone of astonishment, “Aylesford!” then seemed to fall into a fit of musing. Before they again reached the spot, he had walked away, and taken a seat in an arm-chair aft, where he occupied himself in wiping the opera-glass with his handkerchief. If he had recognized Onslow, he had not betrayed it.
Here the attention of all on the upper deck was arrested by an explosion of wrathful oaths.
A tall, gaunt, round-shouldered man, dressed in an ill-fitting suit of some coarse, home-made cloth, had ascended the stairs with a lighted cigar in his mouth. One of the waiters of the boat, a bright-looking mulatto, followed him, calling, “Mister! Mister!”
The tall man paid no heed to the call, and the mulatto touched him on the shoulder, and said, “We don’t allow smoking on this deck,” whereupon the tall man angrily turned on him and, with eyes blazing with savage fire, exclaimed: “What in hell air yer at, nigger? Ask my pardon, blast yer, or I’ll smash in yer ugly profile, sure!”