Agatha smiled at him. “Then,” she said, “I must not keep her waiting.”
She rose and they went back together to join their hostess.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRAVELING COMPANION
A gray haze, thickened by the smoke of the city, drove out across the water when the Scarrowmania lay in the Mersey, with her cable hove short, and the last of the flood-tide gurgling against her bows. A trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat funnel, and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the two steam tugs that lay alongside mingled with the din it made. A gangway from one of them to the Scarrowmania’s forward deck, and a stream of frowsy humanity that had just been released from overpacked emigrant boarding-houses poured up it. There were apparently representatives of all peoples and languages among that unkempt horde—Britons, Scandinavians, Teutons, Italians, Russians, Poles—and they moved on in forlorn apathy, like cattle driven to the slaughter. One wondered how they had raised their passage money, and how many years’ bitter self-denial it had cost them to provide for their transit to the land of promise.
At the head of the gangway stood the steamboat doctors, for the Scarrowmania was taking out an unusual number of passengers, and there were two of them. They were immaculate in blue uniform, and looked very clean and English by contrast with the mass of frowsy aliens. Beside them stood another official, presumably acting on behalf of the Dominion Government, though there were few restrictions imposed upon Canadian immigration then, nor, for that matter, did anybody trouble much about the comfort of the steerage passengers. Each steamer carried as many as she could hold.
As the stream poured out of the gangway, the doctor glanced at each newcomer’s face, and then seizing him by the wrist uncovered it. Then he looked at the official, who made a sign, and the man moved on. Since this took him two or three seconds, one could have fancied that he either possessed peculiar powers, or that the test was a somewhat inefficient one.
A group of first-class passengers, leaning on the thwartship rails close by, looked on, with complacent satisfaction or half-contemptuous pity. Among them stood Mrs. Hastings, Miss Winifred Rawlinson, and Agatha. It was noticed that Wyllard, with a pipe in his hand, sat on a hatch forward, near the head of the gangway. Agatha drew Mrs. Hastings’ attention to it.