CHAPTER XII
THE LONG SHOT
Lang had had an idea that his troubles would be mostly ended when he reached Valparaiso. The first thing was to locate Morrison, who must surely be there; he could take no steps before that. The explorer was well known in the city, he knew, and between the hotels, the American consulate and the Anglo-Saxon population it should be easy to get on his traces.
It was still early in the day. He had drawn bad luck with his hotel, which turned out to be an establishment likely to provide a minimum of comfort at a maximum expense. However, it would do for a few days, and he did not want to waste time in finding better quarters.
He had a list of the chief hotels, and he had thought of telephoning to them all, but his first struggles with a Spanish central dissuaded him from this plan. He went out and hired a horse-drawn cab by the hour, and started through the rainy streets on his round of the hotels.
He went first to the American houses, the Hotel New York and the Great Western; then to the Prince of Wales and the Savoy, the English hotels; and finally to the Berliner and the Santiago and the Imperiale and the Kosmos. He drove from place to place as the day passed, and his hopes darkened. Morrison was not known to be in the city. Several of the hotel managers knew him, but did not remember having seen him for at least six months.
He had great hopes of the American consulate, however. He found indeed that the consul knew the explorer well, but had no idea that he might be in Valparaiso. Sooner or later, however, Morrison would be sure to call at the consulate, and the consul gave Lang a list of American residents and foreign boarding houses where something might be learned.
Lang spent the rest of that day in searching these out, and drew a blank every time. He finished on the heights east of the city, where he had ascended by one of the escalidores, having been forced to abandon the cab. The sun had gone down; dusk was falling, and the wet weather had cleared. Below him lay Valparaiso, a crescent of white lights on the bay, with the red stars of riding ships farther out, and beyond them again, vaguely perceived, the immensity of the Pacific.
He had come into temperate latitudes again, and a chill wind pierced his thin tropical clothing. He had a sudden lonely sense of being homeless and lost and in danger. He had broken into his last thousand dollars. A little more and he would be “on the beach,” penniless in a foreign land.
It was a sort of peril he had never had to face before, and the most paralyzing to a man who has not been trained to meet the rough face of the world. Lang felt his courage collapsing, and it was a medical training that suggested the practical remedy of plenty of food and drink. He returned to the lower town, located the best restaurant and ate a good dinner, regardless of expense. Considerably cheered by this, he went to bed early, with a pint of hot lemonade laced with rum as a preventive of chill, and this treatment temporarily stunned his discouragement and assured him a night of the sleep he needed.
Next morning he felt once more capable of grasping the situation by its thorniest end. He called again at the consulate, and then circled the business section by the water front, making inquiries at the American warehouses and importing agencies, and passed the whole day in these researches. He exhausted the field; he could think of nowhere else to look. He began to doubt whether Morrison had ever come to Valparaiso. And time was important.