“The other clerk won’t be here till midnight,” the woman said. “Perhaps you could come back, then?”
He drove on to the Club, much pleased to be on the track of these Kingsboroughs. There was something odd about the names of Hilary and Margarita. “ ‘A very young gentleman,’ ” he repeated, “and ‘a very nice lady.’ And there, as it happens, is their enemy.”
There, on the pavement before a café on the water-front, was Mr. Wiskey dancing a Hottentot breakdown to his friends. Mr. Wiskey’s hands were behind his back, jutting out his coat-tails; his head was bowed forward because of his boil; he was singing as he danced:
“O, I’m a lady,
A Hottentot lady,
A one-time-piecee lubly gal O.”
His friends kept time for him as he danced by clacking spoons on their front teeth.
Sard wondered how it had come about that a very nice lady and a very young gentleman had roused the employer of such a crew to take extreme measures against them. He reckoned that it would be quite impossible for him to find these Kingsboroughs and then visit Los Xicales. “The thing has always mocked me,” he said, “perhaps all things do, if you think too much of them.”
He entered the Club just as the clocks struck five.
“Why, for the love of Mike,” the Club porter said, “if it ain’t Mr. Harker! Why, sir, how are you? Maybe you’ll not remember me, but I was in the crowd with you in the Venturer one trip, ’way back.”