But when Hunt had gone, Gardiner winked steadily at nothing and stroked his chin.
"Great Scott, this is a game," he said. "I wonder where Gawthrop is?"
But before he found out he sat down and wrote a letter to the elder Gardiner in New York. It was late that evening before he went down to that undesirable quarter of San Francisco known as the Barbary Coast, where Shanghai Smith had his sailor-robbing den located.
As he went along the water-front and saw the ships lying at the wharves, it was "plumb" dark. Though he knew every tough in the city, he walked some way from the edge of the wharves and kept his hand on his six-shooter in the right-hand pocket of his coat. There is never any knowing what may happen in the low quarters of that sink of the Pacific, where all the scum of the world gathers, and it is well to keep one's eyes skinned lest worse may befall. Gardiner had no desire to turn up on a trestle at the morgue as his next public appearance. But though he was careful, he went cheerfully, and could not help laughing.
"Great Scott, to think of Sibley Gawthrop as an able seaman on board the Harvester or the Wanderer! But won't it do him good? These young Californians are a rotten crowd."
He came at last to Smith's house, and stepped upon the verandah floor boldly.
"Why, it's Mr. Gardiner of the Chronicle, so it is," said Billy, who was Smith's runner, and, next to his boss and a few politicians, the hardest case in California. "Is it Mr. Smith you want to see, sir?"
"I'm only just doing a run around, and thought I'd look in, Billy," said Gardiner carelessly.
"Ay, just a cultus nannitch, as they say in Chinook," replied Billy. "But we're always glad to see you."
Gardiner doubted that. But Smith was always civil to newspaper men. He hadn't Gardiner bought, as he had the police, and he knew that a true column and a bit on his doings might bring down an avalanche any day.