Gone was the curly wig, the beard, and the lump on the nose, which had been modelled after Farnham's; gone was the green shade, the sling, and the limp, but much of the odd resemblance, which had been heightened in so artistic a manner, still remained. At last, after crossing an ocean and a continent to do it, I had got my hands on the man I had come to find, and I didn't mean to let him go.
Yes, it certainly had been "dogged" that had done it.
CHAPTER XXVI
A Tell-tale Ornament
"No, you don't!" I remarked, cheerfully, and with the force of superior muscles I pulled him towards me. "Come, sit down here by me," I said. "I want to talk to you." And somehow it came about that we subsided on the cushioned seat together.
He had recognised me, of course, as the man he had seen in the hotel–the man, Noel Stanton, against whom I did not doubt his cablegram had warned him. He was pale as death, and I could see that this meeting, added, like the piling of Ossa upon Pelion, on top of all that he had already gone through, had robbed him of the shattered remnant of his nerve.
Still, he was ready to "bluff" and brave if out while he could. "Confound you!" he exclaimed. "What are you about? You must be mad to attack a stranger without the slightest provocation. Let me alone, sir, or I'll rouse the car."
"I wouldn't, you know, if I were you," I said coolly, for the more excited he grew the more did my own calmness come back to me. "You've been playing a dangerous game ever since you took your passage in the American liner St. Paul (or, rather, since Carson Wildred took it for you), but you've never, perhaps, steered so close to the wind as to-night, when you resorted to incendiarism as a finishing stroke."
The fellow stared at me in simulated nonchalance and defiance, but my hand was on his shoulder still, and I could feel the shudder that ran through his body.
"I say you must be mad," he reiterated.