CHAPTER XIX
THE TIME OF DAY
When that flippant youth, Archibald Archer, making his morning rounds from stateroom to stateroom, beheld Tom Slade hurrying along the promenade deck under the attentive convoy of one of Uncle Sam's sleuths, he was seized with a sudden fear that his protégé was being arrested as a spy.
But Tom was never farther from arrest in all his life. He hurried along beside his companion, feeling somewhat apprehensive, but nevertheless quite important.
The federal detective was small and agile, with a familiar, humorous way about him which helped to set Tom at ease. He had a fashion of using his cigar as a sort of confidential companion, working it over into one corner of his mouth, then into the other, and poking it up almost perpendicularly as he talked. Tom liked him at once, but he did not know whether to take literally all that he said or not.
"Long as you told me your name, I guess I might as well tell you mine, hey? Conne is my name—Carleton Conne. Sounds like a detective in a story, don't it? My great-great-grandfather's mother-in-law on my sister's side was German. I'm trying to live it down."
"What?" said Tom.
Mr. Conne screwed his cigar over to the corner of his mouth and looked at Tom with a funny look.
"You see, we want to meet the doctor before he has a chance to change his watch," said Mr. Conne more soberly. "If he set that thing a little after nine last night (and he couldn't have set it before), he was probably too busy thinking of getting off the ship to think of much else. And he ought to be just coming out of his stateroom by now. We must see him before he sees a clock. You get me?"