'They said so last night, Captain, but they began just about seven. I heard there was another ship come in and they wanted to get us out of the way. I was one of the fust ashore, and it didn't take many minutes afore I was out of the shed where they looks at the things. I says to the first chap I meets, "Where can I take a 'bus to the Metropolitan Hotel?" "You won't get no 'bus here," says he. "How far is it?" "Better than two miles," he says. That settled it, and I started off to walk. I ought to have been here sooner, but some one I asked the way of put me wrong, I suppose, and a box like this feels wonderful heavier the second mile than it does the first.'
An arrangement had already been made for Jacob's board and lodging, and a messenger boy showed him up to his little room at the top of the house, and then took him down to a room where the few white servants in the hotel had their meals. In half an hour he returned to the hall which served as smoking-room and general meeting-place. Captain Hampton had already had a talk with the clerk.
'I have not seen a young woman like that,' the latter said positively, when the photograph was produced, 'but then if the man had registered and written her name and his she might not have come up to the desk. If you go up to the entrance of the dining-room and ask the negro who takes the hats there, he will tell you for certain. He has a wonderful head, that chap has. Sometimes there are as many as three hundred come in to dinner between five and seven. He takes their hats and puts them on the pegs and racks, and as they come out he will give every man his own hat and never make a mistake. I never saw such a chap for remembering faces.'
The negro replied unhesitatingly, on seeing the photograph, that no such lady had taken any meals at the hotel.
'De ladies don't come into my department, sah, but I notice them as they goes in and out, and if that young lady had been here I should have noticed her for sartin.' Captain Hampton returned to the clerk in the hall, who, as he happened for the moment to be disengaged, was not averse to a talk. 'The darkey has not seen her.'
'Then you may be sure she hasn't been here. Yes, I reckon that is about the list of the hotels most of the passengers by the steamers go to,' he said, as he glanced down a list of names Captain Hampton had got a fellow passenger to draw up. 'I will put down two or three others; they are not first-class, but they are a good deal used by people to whom a dollar a day more or less makes a difference. And so you say they have been doing some swindling across the water. She don't look that sort either from her photograph, but they get the things up so one can never tell. I see you haven't got any German hotels; and if, as you say, you think they came by the line from Hamburg, they might have gone to one of them.'
'I should not think it likely they spoke German,' Captain Hampton said.
'Oh, that makes no odds. The waiters all talk English, and like enough on the voyage they would make friends with some Germans who have been here before, and they would recommend them one of their own people.'
'That is probable; and they would be likely to go there too,' Captain Hampton agreed, 'because anyone coming over to search for them would be less likely to search in such places than in houses like yours.'
'Then, again, you see, they might have gone straight through without going into an hotel at all. That would be the safest way, because then there would be no trace left of them.'