“No, but I will find him for ye to-morrow,” replied Paddy Blake. “If he has a room in the English quarter ye can gamble he will drop into my place. If he don’t I will sind a bright lad to round him up. ’Tis easy findin’ him as long as he is not livin’ in the native city. What do ye suppose become of him, annyhow?”
“Maybe he flinched from the notion of quitting the East. When it gets in the blood of these tropical tramps, the grip of it is not easy to break.”
“And he lost his nerve at the last minute,” said Paddy Blake. “I’ve seen cases like it. I’m that way meself.”
Declining a cordial invitation to have a “nightcap,” O’Shea told his ’rickshaw cooly to take him to the Astor House. It seemed extraordinary that his quixotic pilgrimage should have so soon disclosed the identity of the derelict who had drifted into the comfortable haven of Johnny Kent’s farm. This, however, did not greatly astonish O’Shea, who knew that the steps of sailormen in alien ports are not apt to stray far from the water-side. The singular feature of the business was that he should run across the sodden beach-comber, McDougal, who was the needle in a hay-stack of prodigious size. The hand of destiny was in it.
At breakfast next morning Captain O’Shea enjoyed overhearing the talk of a party of American tourists at a near-by table. In their turn the younger women did not fail to observe with interest the clean-cut, resolute shipmaster smartly turned out in fresh white clothes. After they had left the dining-room he picked up a copy of The Shanghai Mercury and carelessly turned to the shipping news where these lines caught his eye:
Bark Wilhelmina Augusta, Spreckels master, cleared for Hamburg with general cargo. Sailed Woosung this A. M.
This turned his thoughts to McDougal and he was impatient to find Paddy Blake and begin the search. He was about to toss the newspaper aside when a paragraph seemed to jump from the page and hit him between the eyes. He read it slowly, his lips moving as if he were spelling out the words:
UNKNOWN EUROPEAN MYSTERIOUSLY KILLED
Late last night the body of a middle-aged man was discovered in the Rue Pechili by an officer of the French municipal police. The place was only a few yards from one of the gate-ways of the native city wall in a quarter which is largely populated by Chinese who have overflowed into the French quarter. The man had been dead only a short time. He is supposed to have been an American or Englishman, although his identity was unknown at the hour of going to press. He was clothed in gray tweeds badly worn and had the appearance of one who had suffered from dissipation. He had been stabbed from behind, in addition to which his body was savagely gashed and mutilated. The British police were notified and Inspector Burke immediately took charge of the case.
Captain O’Shea’s second cup of coffee stood cold and neglected while he continued to gaze abstractedly at the front page of The Shanghai Mercury. He was reading between the printed lines. His sun-browned face had paled a trifle. He was not afraid, but he was conscious of that same feeling of physical abhorrence which had taken hold of him when he first beheld the scarred and branded back of the man dubbed Bill Maguire.