At Copenhagen many inquiries had to be made, and at first we were somewhat helpless; for though the language sounded sufficiently like English to make it additionally annoying that we could not understand it, yet neither we nor those with whom we attempted to converse could make head or tail of that which we or they respectively tried to convey. At the station we could do nothing towards making our wishes known, and at length we determined to visit the nearest hotel and engage an interpreter, if such a person existed.
Here we were lucky, for we found the very man, and to him we confided our need, namely, to get upon the track of an individual who landed from an English steamer, and had, presumably, gone on by the first train elsewhere.
"But where?" asked our commissionaire; and to this question we had, of course, no reply.
"We must begin at the beginning, and go down first to the landing-stage," said our friend.
Now this was annoying, because the journey would be a loss of time; but it was obviously the correct course, and we took it. We must begin our inquiries from the spot at which he first touched land.
Down at the wharf our Dane interviewed several boatmen, all of whom had seen the Thomas Wilcox arrive and depart, and all of whom agreed that a passenger had landed and had engaged a conveyance and driven away.
"To the station, of course," said I. "Why do we wait? This is all a waste of precious time!"
"Which station?" asked our Dane grimly; and, when I had no reply to make, he added, "That is what we have come for to find out."
It seemed, however, that the point was a most difficult one to establish, and that we should be obliged to drive to each station in turn, thereby wasting more time, until there wandered upon the scene, presently, a Danish youth who said he had taken the passenger's bag out of the boat and put it into the carriage. The passenger was a German, he said.
"How do you know that?" asked Jack, through the interpreter.