“Let us sit down, my dear baron, and look over some of the memoranda while we are waiting.”
“Certainly, Your Majesty,” quoth the young man, and with this they passed into the little back room and closed the door. A dock-laborer ripped out an oath of amazement and clattered from the bar to tell his friends that “one o’ them blighted, bleedin’ kings was in the Jolly Mermaid, large as life, so ’elp me Gawd.”
That brace of exiled mariners, Captain O’Shea and Johnny Kent, gazed blankly at each other, and tacitly agreed to wait and try to fathom the riddle. They had dealt with presidents of uneasy republics near the equator, but a real king, to be surveyed at close range, was a fascinating novelty.
Johnny Kent had carefully adjusted his spectacles to survey this rare object, and he now shoved them up beyond his bushy brows before he hoarsely confided to his comrade:
“I thought they went about disguised, Cap’n Mike, same as we run a blockade with no lights and the steamer’s name-boards covered up. Is he the real thing or is it just play-actin’?”
“Europe is full of kings that have been kicked out of their berths,” answered O’Shea. “Maybe this one is a has-been, but he doesn’t look to me like a counterfeit. And I would not set him down for a lunatic out for a stroll with his keeper.”
“He handles himself as sane as you or me,” agreed the chief engineer. “But this is surely a doggoned queer place to find a stray king.”
“’Tis worth watching, Johnny. I’m on me beam-ends for puzzlement.”
Ere long there appeared from the street a bow-legged, barrel-chested, hairy-fisted man with a rolling gait, whom a landlubber might have classified as a rough-and-hearty British seaman accustomed to command vessels in the merchant trade. A captious critic would have perhaps surmised that he had been pickled in rum as well as in brine. Glancing at a card held between a grimy thumb and finger, he asked the bar-maid:
“Is Baron Frederick Martin Strothers hereabouts, my girl? Captain Handy’s compliments.”