“But then?”
“But next I stumble on you at the Portland wharf. Apparently your rôle had, by that time, decidedly shifted. Stevens, who came from Stamford, where he left the launch, even tells me that both you and Pawlinson traveled in the same sleeping coach with him to Boston.”
“I didn’t know it at the time,” I said, but he paid no attention to the interruption as he concluded:
“And now, last night, came the final mystery, for my searchlight revealed both you and Pawlinson at fisticuff loggerheads in a wabbly punt, with a speed-boat accompaniment. As to your place in this little series of events, I confess myself completely mystified; and so it is that I ask you—who was your employer in this thing, and where do you stand, anyway?”
I saw no way to answer except in the strictest truth, and I couldn’t see, for the life of me, how it could hurt matters at all then, for I certainly was completely in his[Pg 48] power any time he should choose to apply the thumbscrews.
“I am one of Chief Garth’s men,” said I. “You know him?”
“Old Garth, of the United?” he chuckled. “I should say I did. Yes?”
“Now, it was mere coincidence that made me figure back there at Port Washington. I didn’t even know Pawlinson then.”
“I have had enough whirls with coincidence to credit improbability on that score. Well?”
He was attention itself, and, had I resolved upon a lie, I might well have feared the brain behind those eyes. But truth is deliciously easy. So I continued quietly: