CHAPTER X.
BREAKING THE NEWS.
Patsy had arrived right in the nick of time.
He had not tried to get to the saloon before ten o’clock, and he showed up there in the guise of a Swede sailor, “three sheets in the wind.”
Ramsay was not there, and neither was Gillman, nor Starlick—the man in the brown derby hat.
Patsy, of course, knew only Ramsay by sight, but he felt sure that he could recognize the others by their voices.
Failing to find all or either of the three, he caught a low-pitched conversation coming from two longshoremen in one corner.
One remark, which he caught in passing, electrified him.
“It was that prize landlubber, Nick Carter, and his mate, that’s who it was.”
Feigning drunkenness, Patsy flopped into a chair and sprawled out on a table, his head in his arms.
“Was the pickin’s good?” asked one of the men.