“Can you tell me whether the Hotel Cuatro Naciones is safe?” she asked in faltering English. “I lost my companion leaving it.”
“I scarcely think it is,” said one of the men, whose accentuation was unmistakably English. “You were staying there?”
“Yes,” said Nettie. “My father was separated from me by the crowd.”
One of the men said something she did not hear to his comrade, while just then a cry of alarm came out of the darkness, and was followed by a rush of feet. Then the man who had spoken turned to her again.
“I’m afraid you can’t stay here,” he said, with evident perplexity.
As he spoke a crowd of shadowy men surged about them, but he called out angrily in Castilian, and before she quite realized what he was doing drew the girl’s hand beneath his arm. Then there was laughter and a shout: “Excuses, Don Bernardino. Pass on, comrades!”
Nettie would have snatched her hand free, but the man held it fast with a little warning pressure, and she went on with him, partly because his voice had been deferential and puzzlingly familiar, and also because it was evident that she could not get away. They went up a calle, where another band of roysterers came clamoring to meet them, until the man led her under an archway where a lamp was burning. Then he gravely dropped her hand, and Nettie gasped as she stared at him. He was burned to the color of coffee, his shoes were burst, and his garments, which had evidently never been intended to fit him, were mostly rags, but his face reminded her of the man she had met on board the “Aurania.”
“It is perhaps not astonishing that you don’t seem to recognize me, Miss Harding,” he said. “You have no idea where your father can have gone to?”
“No,” said the girl, with a little tremor of relief. “He must be in the town, and I would be very grateful if you could take me to him. Of course, I know you now.”
“Is your father Cyrus Harding—Sugar Harding—of New York?” the other man broke in.