He wondered also whether he ought not to keep close to this smooth-spoken pseudo-journalist, who, he felt sure, was also on the track of the treasure-ship. But this would hamper him fatally in his quest for the elusive mate Burke, and this quest was to be Elliott’s next affair.
But he had next to no idea just where or how he would look. He was an inlander; he knew little of the ways of seafaring men ashore, and nothing at all of this particular city. He plunged boldly into the search, however, and, as a preliminary, he spent a day in roaming about the waterfront of Mazagon Bay, entering into conversation with such white seamen as he came across. But he was acutely conscious that he made a bungle of this. These men were too far outside his experience for him to enter into easy relations with them. His immaculate white flannels were also against him; he received either too much deference or too little, and he suspected that he was taken for a detective or a customs officer. He decided that he would have to assume a less respectable appearance.
But every one he met professed total ignorance of the Clara McClay and her mate. Most of the men were transient; they had been in Bombay for only a few days or weeks, and the arrival of a single man, even the survivor of a wreck, is too slight an episode to leave any mark upon such a port as Bombay, where the shipping of a whole world is gathered. But a vessel is a different thing, and Elliott learned—it was the whole result of his day’s work—that the Italian steamer Andrea Sforzia, which had picked up Burke’s boat, had sailed a month ago for Cape Town.
Had Burke gone with her? No one knew. Elliott thought it most probable; and in that case the rich grave of the gold-ship must be rifled already. A feeling of sick failure spread through Elliott’s system as he realized that the whole quest might have been in vain, even before they left America. But he cabled to Henninger at Zanzibar:
“Steamer Andrea Sforzia sailed Cape Town about April 10th, likely with Burke.”
Still it might be that the mate had not sailed with the Italian steamer, after all, and, while awaiting a reply from Zanzibar, Elliott resumed his detective work. It was good to pass the anxious time, if it led to no other result. He hired a room in a cheap sailors’ hotel in Mazagon, where he went every morning to change his white clothes for a dirty, bluish dungaree slop-suit, which he bought at a low clothing store, and, thus suitably attired, he was able to pursue his explorations among the tortuous ways of the old Portuguese settlement and attract no attention so long as he kept his mouth shut. These wanderings he often carried far into the night, returning finally to his dirty room to resume the garb of respectability.
He saw many strange things in these explorations among the groggeries, dives, and sailors’ boarding-houses, where the seamen of every maritime race on earth herded together in their stifling quarter. He sat in earthen-floored drinking-shops, where Lascars, Norse, Yankees, Englishmen, and Italians gulped down poisonous native liquors like water, and quarrelled in a babel of tongues; he leaned over fan-tan tables in huge, filthy rooms that had been the palaces of merchant princes; and nightly he saw the tired dancing-girls from the Hills posture obscenely before an audience of white, yellow, and brown sea scum, ferociously drunk or stupid with opium. More than once he saw knives drawn and used, and the blood spurt dark in the candle-light; and once he had to run for it to avoid being gathered in by the police along with his companions. But nowhere could he hear anything of what he sought, and he could find no one who would admit having seen the mate of the Clara McClay.
He had received no reply from Henninger, and this, perhaps, illogically reassured him. After a week he had ceased to expect any, but by this time he had well ceased to believe that Burke was still in Bombay. If he were there, Elliott did not believe that he could be found, and he regretted anew that he had not obtained a detailed description of the man from Bennett. He visited the American consul again, but that official had no further news, and was able to describe the mate only as “a big fellow, with a big beard turning gray,” which was indefinite enough.
After all, Elliott reflected, the man would be likely to change his name and to keep apart from other seamen. Surely, if he had been going to fit out a wrecking expedition, he would have done it long since, but such an enterprise would certainly have left memories upon the waterfront. Elliott could not learn that anything of the sort had been done. Possibly Burke had gone elsewhere to launch his expedition; very likely he had no money, and had gone elsewhere to obtain it.
Elliott grew very weary with turning over all these possibilities, and almost disheartened, but he persisted in his perambulations about the sailors’ quarter. He was beginning to feel the deadly lassitude which stealthily grows upon the unacclimated white man in the tropics, and he would probably have given up the quest in another week, but for a lucky chance.