“There is the enemy’s stronghold, and now for Jack Blunt’s plan of campaign! I wonder if he’ll come over to-day, or to-morrow? He must have had my telegram last night!” Alan Hawke amused himself with the bold, black-eyed French girl’s vicious stories of olden deeds done there in Etienne Garcin’s gloomy spider’s den. He even laughed when the red-bodiced she-devil laughingly pointed down at the loosened floor-planks in the back room, underneath which mantrap the swish of the throbbing waves could be heard.
Then the sheeted, cold driving rain hid the promontory, with its heavy, lumpy-looking fort, the old gray granite parish church, and the clustered ships of the harbor, now dashing about and tugging wildly at their doubled moorings, soon to be left high and dry on the soft ooze when the thirty-foot tide receded. “There’s where we find our best customers,” laughed the French wanton, as Alan Hawke drew her to his knee, and they laughed merrily over the golden harvest of the sea, the price of the recovered dead. Through the narrow stone fanged streets lumbered along the heavy French hooded carts, driven by squatty men in oil skins and sou’westers, and laden down with the spoils of the whale, cod, and oyster fisheries. Stout women in huge blue aprons, with baskets on their rounded arms, gossiped at the protecting corners, while the shouts of Landlord Etienne Garcin’s drunken band of sea wolves now began to ring out in the smoky salle a boire.
It was two o’clock when the burly form of Etienne Garcin was propelled unceremoniously into Alan Hawke’s room. A grin of satisfaction spread over the bullet-headed old ruffian’s face, and his round gray pig eyes twinkled, as he noted the already established entente cordiale between Jack Blunt’s pal and the wanton spy who was the absent Jack’s own especial pet. But, Alan Hawke was temporarily blind to the universally offered charms of the soubrette as he read Joseph Smith’s careful report.
“That’s the talk!” joyously cried Hawke. His heart bounded in a fierce thrill. “By God! Simpson shall be ‘done up’ in short order. The drunken old dog. He cut off the payment of my drafts with his blabbing tongue!
“Yes, over the cliffs he goes, and we will make sure of him—forever—before he takes his last tumble! Jack! Jack! You are a hero!” he mused, as the triumphant words of Jack Blunt’s great discovery were read again and again. And then, he carefully burned the letter, before the astonished eyes of the tempting companion of his waiting hours. “These fools of employers!” cheerfully muttered Alan Hawke. “They always think that ‘Servant’s Hall’ has no eyes. That the maid in her cap and apron has not the same burning passions as idle Madame in her silks and laces. That the man has not his own easy-going vices just as alive and masterful as the base appetites of the swell master.”
While Alan Hawke thus exulted at Granville, there was gloom and jealousy in the heart of Prof. Alaric Hobbs, of Waukesha University, Wisconsin, U. S. A.
A tall, lank, bespectacled “Westerner,” nearly thirty-five years of age, the blue-eyed country boy had dragged himself up from the obscurity of a frontier American farm into the higher life. Uncouth, awkward, and yet resolute and untiring, he had justified his first instructor’s prediction:
“He has the head of a horse, and will make his mark!” Newspaper trainboy, chainman, assistant on Government frontier surveys, and frontier scout, he early saved his money so as to complete a sporadic university curriculum. A trip to Liberia, a dash down into Mexico, and a desert jaunt in Australia, had not satisfied his craving for adventure. With the results of two years of professional lectures, he was now imbibing continental experiences, and plotting a bicycle “scientific tour of the world.” Hard-headed, fearless, devoted, and sincere, he was a mad theorist in all his mental processes, and had tried, proved, and rejected free love, anarchy, Christian science, and a dozen other feverish fads, which for a time jangled his mental bells out of tune. A cranky tracing of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel down to the genial scalpers of the American plains had thrown him across the renowned Professor Andrew Fraser, who had, on his part, located these same long mourned Hebrews in Thibet, ignoring the fact that they are really dispersed in the United States of America as “eaters of other men’s hard-made ‘honey’” in the “drygoods,” clothing, and “shent per shent” line. For, a glance at the signs on Broadway will prove to any one that the “lost” have been found in Gotham.
Smoking his corncob pipe the Professor paced his rooms at the Royal Victoria, and mentally consigned Prince Djiddin and his indefatigable Moonshee to Eblis, the Inferno, Sheol, or some other ardent corner of Limbo. “How long will these two yellow fellows keep poor old Fraser enchanted?” mused the disgruntled American, mindful of his hotel bill running on. “The old man is crazy after the two Thibetans, and I can’t see his game. He does not wish me to publish my own volume first. That is why he has given me the ‘marble heart,’ and taken them into his house. Their wing of the Banker’s Folly is now an Eastern idolaters’ temple. If I could only hook on to the ‘Moonshee,’ I might make a ‘scoop’—a clean scoop—on old Fraser. God! how my book would sell if I could only get it out first. And yet I dare not offend this old scholar, Andrew Fraser. He must be true to me. He has read to me all the original manuscript of his own half-finished work. He must trust to me, and he has promised to give me a resume of their disclosures also after they leave. The Thibetan Prince will only be here two weeks longer.”
“Then old Fraser will take me to his heart again.” Alaric Hobbs reflected on his vain attempt to try the Tunguse, Chinook, Zuni, Apache, Sioux, and Esquimaux dialects on the handsome Prince Djiddin, whose Oriental magnificence was even now the despairing admiration of the two pretty housemaids.