“Who was your double, Captain Page?” he asked, with a jerk of his head toward the door which had let Champe out to freedom.
I saw it all instantly. Castner had been with me two days before and had helped me to select the very clothes Champe was now wearing. It was a thrust that called for the deftest parrying, and I was not at my best—I never am in the mornings.
“The man who went out as I came down?” I said, sparring to gain time. “Do you think he favored me?”
“As to his face I could not say,” was the cool reply. “I think he must have the toothache, to judge from his mufflings. But I spoke of his clothes. Hadn’t you noticed that he was wearing a copy of the suit I helped you buy of the little Dutch Jew day before yesterday, Captain?”
I said I had not noticed it, having other things to think of, but the nonchalant reply did not banish the queer look from Castner’s eyes. And when I sought to drag him away from the dangerous subject by asking if he had learned anything new about the movements of the fleet, he answered my question briefly and went back in a word to my perilous skating pond.
“I wonder that you didn’t remark the gentleman’s clothes,” he said musingly. “I don’t think there is another cloak like that in all New York. You say you don’t know him?”
“How should I know him?” I demanded with a good show of impatience. “I merely saw that some one walked ahead of me down the stair and out of the door.”
“Strange,” he said, in the same half-musing tone. “Do you know, Captain Page, I could have sworn that you spoke to him less than a second before you—rather rudely, I fancied—pushed him aside to shake hands with me?”
I thought it was all up with me now, but I set my teeth on a grim resolve to die fighting.
“Perhaps you could even tell me what I said to this gentleman who, at the moment, was nothing more to me than a stumbling-block in my way,” I said, laughing ironically.