“My apology is, at least, as ready as was my exclamation,” declared the stranger in a pleasant voice that disarmed hostility. “The term was not meant offensively. I saw you at Oakland one day when a race was run, and I’ve heard certain qualities of yours yarned about at mess tables in the East. I ask your pardon.”
“It’s granted,” acceded Spurrier of necessity. “And since you’ve heard of me, you doubtless know enough to make allowances for my short temper and excuse it.”
“I have heard your story,” admitted the other man 34 frankly. “My name is Snowdon. It’s just possible you may have heard of me, too.”
“You’re not Snowdon the engineer: the Panama Canal man, the Chinese railway builder, are you?”
“I had a hand in those enterprises,” was the answer, and with a slight bow the gentleman went his way.
The spot where the two men had stood talking was far enough aft to look down on the space one deck lower and one degree farther astern, where, as through a well space, showed the meaner life of the steerage. There was a light third-class list on this voyage, and when Spurrier moved out of the obscurity which had been thrown over him by the life boat’s shadow, he stood gazing idly down on an empty prospect. He gazed with an interest too moodily self-centered for easy inciting.
He himself stood now clear shown under the frosted globe of an overhead light and, after a little, roused to a tepid curiosity, he fancied he could make out what seemed to be a human figure that clung to the blackest of the shadows below him.
He even fancied that in that lower darkness he caught the momentary dull glint of metal reflecting some half light, and an impression of furtive movement struck in upon him. But after a moment’s scrutiny, which failed to clarify the picture, he decided that his imagination had invented the vague shape out of nothing more tangible than shadow. If there had been a man there he seemed to have dissolved now.
So Spurrier turned away.
Had his eyes possessed a nearer kinship to those of the cat, which can read the dark, he would have altered his course of action from that instant forward. He 35 would, first, have gone to the captain and demanded permission to search the steerage for an ex-private of the infantry company that had lately been his own; a private against whose name on the muster roll stood the entry: “Dead or deserted.”