I looked about for Clark and his companions. Five or six loungers leaned against the bar, listening to a stout, red-faced Irishman, who was shaking his fist vigorously as an accompaniment to a loud denunciation of the Chinese. There was something about the man that drew a second look, though at first glance I thought I had recognized the symptoms of the saloon politician. He had a bristling brown mustache, a shrewd mouth, and a strong aggressive jaw. A little above the medium height, with compact, heavy frame, and broad shoulders that betokened strength, he was a type of the substantial workman.
Beyond the oratorical Irishman with his denunciations of "the haythen divils," stood a man with hat drawn down over his eyes, half hiding his sallow face, and with hands deep in his pockets, who glanced furtively from side to side, as if in suspicion that an enemy was about. Something faintly stirred in memory at the sight of him, but he shuffled out of the saloon as I passed him, and it was not until he was gone that I connected him with the spy whose overcoat lay in my room. It was too late to follow him, for, before I had recalled the vagrant memory, a short fat old man waddled slowly forward and stood before me with the air of a proprietor. I divined that I was face to face with H. Blasius.
"Vat vill you have, mine friend?" he inquired deliberately.
I looked into his fat pasty face, that gave back an unhealthy almost livid pallor to the light that shone upon it, and caught the glance of his shifty bleary eyes under their puffy lids, and a shudder of repulsion ran through me. He was a man of sixty or more. His face, clean-shaven except for a mustache and chin-tuft stained with tobacco juice, revealed to the world every line that a wicked life had left upon it.
He rubbed his fat, moist hands on the dingy white apron that he wore, gave a tug at his mustache, and waited for my reply.
"_Non_--no soch man is here," he said suspiciously. "I have no one of zat name."
"I’m quite sure he’s here," I said. "And I must see him."
The brow of H. Blasius darkened, and he looked about slowly as though he meditated calling for assistance to hasten my departure.
"I don’t vant ze trouble," he had begun, when I caught sight of my man at a table in the alcove at the other end of the long room.