The stuff that was in Clement Seadon came out in the way he handled this contretemps. He went straight to the Canadian Pacific shipping agent, and put the problem up to him. The man belonged to a service that suffers attractively from an ideal of complete efficiency. The agent began to hustle.
He was, of course, helped by Clement. Clement had the type of mind that pays attention to a porter’s registration number when the porter holds up the metal plate upon which it is stamped to the hirer’s gaze. Clement remembered and repeated the number, and left the matter in the hands of the agent. In half an hour his luggage was on board the Empress.
A foreman had named the porter from the number; a dock policeman had stated that he had seen this man trundling the barrow-load of luggage away from the shed in the direction of the Cunard dock; the luggage was run to earth. The porter, on being taxed with his strange behavior, offered a wild and absurd story of having been told that Mr. Seadon had suddenly received orders to go by Cunard. A steward had come off the Empress just as he was going on to it, and given this very definite command.
He was, so the porter said, “a littlish, mean-looking ’ound of a steward.” Nicholson was a big man. And, though the porter may have based his description of the offending steward on anger, Clement, with a sudden blaze of comprehension, now recognized how well that description fitted the steward who had just tried to turn the little lawyer off the boat. Had that steward tried to keep him off the boat also? It looked extraordinarily like it.
Thus, though he might have been inclined to scout the whole idea of the gang of rogues who were working to accomplish the undoing of the girl Heloise and her million pounds, as something absurd and unreal, actually the train of circumstances forced him to say limply:
“You are rather stunning as well as other things.”
IV
The little man went on promptly with his hasty and hurtling attack.
“I know, stunning and absurd and incredible. It sounds all that, I know. To me it is all that—only, I’ve got to face things as they appear to me and I’ve so little to go on, yet so much. A huge fortune, that foolish girl’s happiness, and all that sort of thing—is at stake....”
He seemed anxious to impress Clement with the soundness of his case, and it was now Clement who cried, “But get on with it, man. You haven’t too much time. You’ll have to go ashore very soon. Tell me the facts.”