as far as I decently could. I did tell him, amongst other things, that
my name was Aykroyd, and that I lived in the North of England, but
not very much beyond this. After a while he pulled out his revolver
and commenced examining it in a careless sort of fashion. As I did not
like this turn of affairs, I pulled out my own weapon, which was built
for business and twice the size of the one carried by the stranger,
and made a pretence of looking it over very carefully. The stranger
asked me to let him examine my "gun," but I told him that it was a
weapon that I did not like to hand about for fear of accidents, and
after a final look at the charges, I put it back into my coat pocket
in such a position that it covered the stranger, and kept my finger
on the trigger until we reached Dublin. The American tried to keep
up a conversation all the way, but I was not very encouraging, and I
thought that by the time we reached Dublin he would be heartily sick of
my company. But when I got out of the station and was driving off to
my hotel, I was surprised to find that he jumped on to the same car,
and said he would go to the same hotel as I did. After having a wash
I came down into the breakfast room and heard the American asking the
waitress if she knew Mr. Berry, to which she replied that she did; and
then if Mr. Berry was there that morning, to which she replied that she
had not seen him. As a matter of fact she had not, and I slipped along
the passage to tell her, as she went to the kitchen, that my name, _pro
tem_, was Aykroyd. I found in the coffee room that there was a letter
addressed to me, on the mantel-piece. The stranger was examining this,
and asked me if I knew the hangman by sight. When it was nearly time to
catch my boat the stranger still stuck to me, and at the last moment he
suggested that we should have a drink together. We went to Mooney's,
where I was known to the bar-tender, to whom I tipped a vigorous wink
as we went in, which showed him there was something in the wind.
After ordering our drinks the American asked him if he knew Berry,
the hangman, to which he truthfully replied that he did. The American
then asked if he knew whether Berry had come from Galway by the night
mail, adding "he was expected to travel by that train, but Mr. Aykroyd
and myself came by it and we saw nobody like him, though I carefully
looked along the whole train." The bar-tender of course knew nothing,
so we drank up, and I went out to my car, the American shaking hands
with me and wishing me a pleasant voyage. I had run it rather close,
and quick driving only just brought us to the quay in time for me to
get aboard. As the ship swung out from the quay-side, a car, driven at
red-hot speed, came dashing along, and the passenger, whom I recognised
as my American, gesticulated wildly, as if he wanted the vessel to
stop. But we swung out with steam and tide, and he drove some distance
along the quay-sides wildly but vainly waving his hands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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