When she rolled down to the wharf the next day in the Lindon barouche, the officials on the steamboat's deck were impressed with her magnificence and beauty.
For most men, nothing could be more sweetly beautiful than her appearance, as she went carefully along the gangway to the old Eleusinian, and there was quite a competition between the old captain and the young second officer as to who should show her more civility.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information; but to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to lack of matter. Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.—George Eliot—(Felix Holt).
It did not take Detective Dearborn long to find out that Jack had engaged a cab early in the morning and had then removed some luggage from his rooms. This confirmed him in the idea that the crime had been a carefully planned one. But his trouble lay in not being able to find the driver of the cab. This man had driven off somewhere on a trip that took him apparently out of town, and Dearborn began to wonder whether Jack had been driven to some neighboring town, so as to proceed in a less conspicuous way by some railway.
Late at night, however, Jehu turned up at his own house very drunk. The horses had brought him home without being driven. He had been down at Leslieville all day, with some "sports," who were enjoying a pigeon-shooting match at that place, and who had retained cabby at regulation rates and all he could drink—a happy day for him. Dearborn found he could tell him nothing about the occurrence of the morning of the same day, or where he had gone with Jack's valises; so, perforce, he had to let him sleep it off till morning.
The first rational account the detective could get out of him was at ten o'clock on the morning following. He then found out why the valises had not been seen at the railway stations, or at any of the usual points of departure. The caretaker of the yacht club could only tell him, when he called, that Mr. Cresswell had been at the club somewhere about noon the day before, and had gone away in his boating-clothes, rowing east round the head of the wharf close by.
"I must tell you," said Dearborn to the caretaker, "that Mr. Cresswell's friends are alarmed at his absence and have sent me to look after him. Would you know the boat he went in if you saw it?"