Carroll would have to surrender those photographs, those mementos of the dead. And explanations were due from him also, in plenty. Lang was eager to get back to Mobile at once. He wanted to be there before Eva should return, but the first train was at three forty-five. It was a fast train, but it went all too slow for his impatience. However, when he arrived at the Mobile depot and telephoned the Iberville Hotel he was told that Miss Morrison had not yet returned.
He left a message for her, requesting her to call him up as soon as she came in; and went up to his own hotel where, he reflected, he was paying twenty dollars weekly for a room which had lately been of very little value to him.
At the desk the clerk told him that a gentleman had been twice inquiring for him that day; in fact, the gentleman was perhaps somewhere about the lobby at that moment. Lang looked. Only one man was likely to be seeking him there, and he was not surprised to sight Carroll seated beside a pillar at some distance, at a strategic point to observe the desk.
Lang went to him at once. The young adventurer had a new suit of clothes, and looked very different from the shipwrecked mariner of the day before. He had lost, or controlled, his resentment, too, for he rose and gave the physician an affable greeting. Lang did not wish to quarrel, and he accepted it on the same terms.
“I wanted to see you,” he said immediately. “Those things in the iron box—photos and such—I think you have them. I want you to give them to me.”
“Not quite, doctor,” Carroll returned, blandly. “You put it over me once, but I have a safe-deposit box of my own now.”
“It isn’t for myself. I promised Miss Morrison that I’d get them for her. They were her father’s, of course.”
Carroll took it without blinking.
“Miss Morrison?” he said, questioningly.
“His daughter. Why,” Lang added, “you’ve seen her. She was the lady who was with me at the Bayview Hotel, when you came to call me to your ‘yacht.’”