The gangway was pulled in, a seaman cast off the mooring rope, and the vessel sheered off from the landing-stage with those seemingly aimless movements with which a steamer, until she is well under way, responds to the signals from the bridge. In a few minutes the Hedwig von Wissmann was heading southward down the lake, on her three-hundred-mile voyage to Bismarckburg.
The younger of the two passengers lit a cigarette and unobtrusively took stock of his fellow-travellers. The tall man before mentioned was already puffing at a long black cigar, and a steward, with marked servility, had placed a glass of some lemon-coloured liquid on a table at his elbow. Beyond him four men of middle age, also provided with cigars and glasses, were playing cards, not in dignified silence, like Sarah Battle of immortal memory, but with a sort of voracity, and a voluble exchange of gutturals. Sitting apart, smoking a dark briar pipe, sat a grizzled and somewhat shabby passenger who, though the brim of his panama was turned down over his eyes, had nevertheless watched and drawn conclusions about the two strangers.
"H'm! Public school--nineteen, perhaps--griffin--nice lad--clean," his disjointed thoughts ran. "T'other fellow--Potsdam--goose step--beer barrel--don't like the breed."
For a while he sat smoking, giving a little grunt now and then, and now and then a glance at the young Englishman. Presently he heaved himself out of his chair, tilted back his hat, and waddling a few steps, planted himself with legs apart in front of the youth.
"Harrow or Rugby, sir?" he said without preamble.
"Neither, sir," replied the other with a smile. "I was at quite an obscure grammar school--not a public school in the--well, in the swagger sense."
The old man's grey eyes twinkled.
"H'm!" he ejaculated. "Don't get up." He took a chair that stood folded against one of the stanchions and drew it alongside.
"Name, sir?"
The youth looked into the face of his questioner, saw nothing but benevolence there, and thinking "Queer old stick!" answered--