“That’s her name.” Kenyon saw that the man had something to impart, and added: “Well?”
“It just happens, sir, that I lay alongside of the power-boat Piedmont this evening. And just before I got your message to have my boat ready, a party comes on board of her; and from what I heard the engineer say before they started out, they, too, were going to meet a steam yacht. And it just happens that it, also, is the Wizard.”
Kenyon leaned back against the cabin and lit a cigarette; Webster shrugged his shoulders. The group of hard-faced men upon the top of the cabin listened intently, nodded to each other, and muttered their opinions of the cruise upon which they had volunteered. A clear voice spoke from the little companionway which caused them all to start and turn. It was Dallas who stood there, her long coat and the curling ends of her dark hair blowing in the wind.
“What sort of people were they who engaged this other boat?” she asked.
“A queer looking lot, miss,” and Kenyon smiled as he saw the speaker shoot a quick glance at the group forward. “About ten all told, I should think. One of them appeared to be pretty far gone; they had to carry him aboard. It was a Chinaman.”
She looked at Kenyon and he saw her face go whiter than ever.
“Hong Yo,” she whispered. “Oh, if we only knew what that means.”
“It means, I should think, that Forrester has summoned his friends,” said Webster. “From what Kenyon has told me, Forrester and Hong Yo seem to be particularly intimate.”
There was a curious expression upon the face of Dallas. Kenyon wondered when he had seen it before, and then suddenly remembered that it had stolen across her countenance that night in Selden’s Square, when she gazed at Anna at the old man’s bedside. And he now recognized it as a species of doubt.
“But, surely,” cried Kenyon, “you do not think that this move of Forrester’s is upon his own hook—that he is playing the Chinaman false!”