“But now he is gone,” he mourned. “I wonder if drink has claimed him. Or is he dead?
“Hardly dead,” he corrected himself. “Men, like wounded fish, come to the surface to die. Had he died I would have known it.”
Strangely enough, at this moment he thought once more of that spectre-like individual, the Gray Shadow, that had three times crossed his path and three times vanished.
“Unusual sort of person, if it be a person,” he said to himself. “Always appears when I am in more or less danger. If I believed in the return of the spirits of the dead I’d say it was the spirit of some dead friend set to guard me.”
And Joyce Mills, that daring daughter of a famous father, you will recall her. Johnny, too, recalled her with a sigh.
Some people he found it difficult to understand. Joyce Mills was one of these. Once she had inspired him. Now she had gone into the humdrum business of selling books in a department store.
“At least that’s what she was doing when I saw her last. Queer business for a girl like that,” he grumbled.
And yet, as he recollected his last meeting with her, he seemed again to detect a mysterious twinkle in her eyes which appeared to say: “You don’t know all; nor even half.”
“Odd sort of girl,” he said to himself. “Have to look her up.”
But here we are nearing the city and a new day.