"Townsend, then?" broke in the caller. "Is he here?"
"Yassuh, Mistah Townsend is in his room, sah, but dat odder man——"
Without pausing further, the man pushed roughly past the darky, to that person's intense astonishment, and went up the hall stairs three steps at a time. A moment later he had flung open a door unceremoniously.
There were two men in the room, and they started up quickly as the newcomer hurled himself in on them.
"Clackett!" exclaimed one of the men who had been in the room, facing the other with a good deal of surprise. "What's all this hurry for?"
"Sixty has sailed, cap'n!" exclaimed Clackett, dropped into a chair.
"Great guns!" gasped the third man. "Must have been kind o' sudden."
"When did he sail, Clackett?"
"Ten o'clock this morning, steamer Santa Maria, a fruiter bound for British Honduras."