"Well, but you have not yet told me his name, or any thing about him, while you go on tantalizing me with speculations as to how he came to be here, and what he is doing!" said Harding.
"True enough," answered Leslie. "Well, he is not the sort of man to talk about loosely in the streets; so wait a moment, until I use my night-key and we get up into my room. There we can smoke a cigar, and I will tell you all I know of him, which is just enough to excite my wonder to a much greater height than your own."
Less than five minutes sufficed to fulfil the conditions prescribed; and in Leslie's little room, himself occupying the three chairs it contained, by sitting in one, and stretching out his two legs on the others, while Harding threw off his coat and lounged on the bed, Leslie poured out his story, and the smoke from his cigar, with about equal rapidity.
"The name of that singular man," he said, "is Dexter Balston, and he is by birth a Virginian. You heard the girl call him 'Deck,' which you no doubt took to be 'Dick,' but which she really meant as a familiar abbreviation of his name. It is a little singular that I should have met him first at a theatre, and not far from the one at which we just now encountered him. It was in the fall of 1857, I think, going in with a party of friends, one night, to Laura Keene's, that one of the ladies of the party was rudely jostled by a large man, who caught his foot in the matting of the vestibule and fell against her with such violence as nearly to throw her to the floor. He turned and apologized at once, and with so much high-toned and gentlemanly dignity, that all the party felt almost glad that the little accident had occurred. This made the first step of an acquaintance between him and myself; and when, in the intermission the same evening, I met him for a few moments in a saloon near the theatre, we drank together, held some slight conversation, exchanged cards, and each invited the other to call at his lodgings. His card lies somewhere in the bureau there at this moment, and it read, I remember, 'Dexter Ralston, Charles City, Virginia,' with 'St. Nicholas' written in pencil in the corner. He was a wealthy planter, living near Charles City, as I afterwards gathered from conversation with him, and had an interest in tobacco transactions at the North which kept him a large proportion of his time in this city.