“No, I can’t tell it, not even to you. It’s not my own secret. I’ve got three partners in it, and my particular task is to hunt down a man whom I never set eyes on. I’ve chased him a matter of ten thousand miles, and he’s supposed to be somewhere in this city,” looking down at the wet smoke that hung over the bustling port.
Somewhere under that haze was the clue to the drowned million, and he felt the shame of his idleness. He had been philandering away his time, and at this juncture when every day was priceless. He turned back to the girl.
“Thank you for waking me up. Your advice always comes at the psychological moment,” he said. “My holiday’s over. To-morrow I start work again.”
He went down to the city that afternoon, in fact, but the old perplexity returned upon him when he tried to think how and where he was to begin his search. He went the rounds of the steamer offices and scrutinized the outgoing passenger-lists for the past three weeks. There was no name that he recognized. He tried the consulates again without any result. He could think of no new move, and he was irritated at his own lack of resource.
Yet the Hongkong Club was the centre of all the foreign life of the colony; it was visited daily by almost every white man on the island, and if Burke, or Baker, were in the city, he would be certain to gravitate there sooner or later. So Elliott took to spending days in that institution, eagerly scrutinizing every big-boned elderly man of seafaring appearance who entered. But, as he often reflected, he might rub elbows with his man daily and not know it; and he regretted more than ever that he had not obtained a full description of the mate.
After a week of this sedentary sort of man-hunting, he became imbued with a deep sense of the futility of the thing. It was only by the merest chance that he could hope to learn anything. It was chance that had assisted the affair up to the present; the whole scheme was one gigantic gamble, discovered, financed, and operated by sheer good luck, and the run seemed exhausted. Anyhow, he thought fatalistically, good fortune was as likely to strike him on the Peak as in the city, and he took to spending his days on the veranda once more. He cabled again to Henninger:
“Track totally lost. What shall do?”
Still, he did not totally abandon the search, but rather he made it a pretext for little exploring expeditions round the city and suburbs with Margaret, accompanied by her father when he could get away from business. They prowled about Kowloon, and they all visited Macao together, where Laurie exhibited the blandest oblivion of his recent lapse, and lectured his companions most edifyingly upon the curse of gambling, the degeneracy of the Portuguese race, and the corruption of the Church of Rome.
They visited the shipyards opposite Hongkong, saw the naval headquarters and the missionary station, and, a week later, all three of them crossed to Formosa on Saturday and returned on Sunday, merely for the refreshing effect of the open sea breezes.
The heavy Chinese smell came off the coast as they returned into Hongkong Roads late on Sunday night. Elliott sickened at the thought of resuming the search that had become hateful to him, in a city that, but for one thing, had become intolerable.