“Buck comes up at eight bells, saying the petticoat man had woke up wanting to know where he was and asking to be taken to Los Angeles. I didn’t bother about the chap, didn’t see him till next morning, when I turned out to find the gale gone into a six-knot breeze and Buck and him sitting at breakfast.
“He’d washed and brushed and looked more like a human being, and he’d given up wantin’ to be taken to Los Angeles and he’d settled down to his gruel.
“We were keen to have his story out of him and know what the crime was, but we had no time for tale-telling with the damage on deck, for we’d lost several spars in the blow, so we just left him to smoke and think over his sins and didn’t tackle him till two days later, when he told us the whole yarn right off, and without winking, so’s that we couldn’t help believing him.
“This is it, as far as I can remember, with nothing left out that matters.
III
“Billy Broke was his name and he’d left Los Angeles as I’ve told you on a visit to ’Frisco to see a wholesale firm on some business. He put up at the ‘Paris’ and went to his room to change his necktie and brush his hair, and when he opened his grip to fetch out the tie and the hairbrush, he come on a woman’s red silk petticoat rolled up and stuck in anyhow. At first he thought it was his wife’s, but he couldn’t remember ever seeing her in possession of such a garment, she being a woman of quiet tastes and not given to violent colours. Then he thought the thing must have been shoved in for fun by some joking young chaps that had been on the train. The more he considered this, the more he was sure of it, and down he sits to think things over.
“First of all he says to himself that if the thing was shoved in by them guys for fun it must have been stolen, then it came to him that maybe they didn’t put it in for fun but to get rid of it as evidence against them of some crime they’d committed. That made him sweat, but he got a clutch on himself, telling himself it was only in magazine stories things like that happened and that the chances were it belonged to his wife. Then he told himself that no matter who it belonged to or who put it there, he’d got to get rid of it.
“He wouldn’t risk bringing it back home, not much, and he wouldn’t risk keeping it an instant longer in his possession for fear of detectives arriving whilst it was still in his possession, so down he goes to the office and begs, borrows or steals a piece of brown paper and a yard and a half of string and back he comes to his room and wraps the evidence up and ties the string round it.
“‘There,’ says Billy to himself, ‘that’s done. Now the only thing I’ve got to do is take it out and lose it. Just throw it away. Some poor woman will pick it up and grateful she’ll be for it.’
“He comes down and goes out with the parcel under his arm and then he finds himself in the street. He’d thought to drop the parcel in the street casually as he walked along, it seemed the easiest thing in the world to do, but no sooner had he left the hotel with the parcel under his arm than he felt that everyone was watching him. That wasn’t stupidity either. Everyone was watching him. Everyone in every street is watching everyone else, doing it unbeknown to themselves most of the time, but doing it; it’s maybe a habit that has come down to us from the time we were hunters, and our lives depended on our eyes, but it’s there and if you fall down in any street half a dozen people will see you fall who otherwise would never have known of your existence, passing you without seeing you, consciously.