“It was Ethel,” said he, scratching his head. “But consarn me if I can think of the other name.”
“Norton,” suggested Walter.
“That’s right!” said Dolph. Then, in surprise: “But how’d you know it?”
“Wait,” said Davy Crockett.
Walter halted in the answer he was about to make.
“Don’t look around,” said Crockett. “But I see that sneaking fellow Davidge watching us from the upper deck.”
The place where the little party stood upon the wharf was in the great shadow cast by the “Mediterranean” as she lay at her moorings; and by a sly glance upward, Ned Chandler saw the black-clad, sharp-faced lawyer leaning over the rail of the boat, and evidently doing his best to hear what was being said.
At once, though with an assumption of carelessness, they walked up the wharf, and when out of hearing and also out of sight behind some bales of cotton, they began to question the old Texan.
In a few moments they were convinced of the welcome fact that Ethel Norton, the girl whom they were going to San Antonio to seek, was in New Orleans.
“It looks,” said Ned Chandler, to Walter, “that all we’ve got to do now is to keep on board the boat until she reaches New Orleans. It’s turned out no kind of a job at all.”