Mr. Cripps sat speechless in the bar and trembled, while Grandfather Nat remained for an hour in the skipper's parlour with Conolly the half-drunken. What they said one to another I never learned, nor even if my grandfather persuaded the man to tell him anything; though there can be no doubt he did. For myself, I moved uneasily about the bar-parlour, and presently I slipped out into the alley to gaze at the river from the stair-head. I was troubled vaguely, as a child often is who strives to analyse the behaviour of his elders. I stared some while at the barges and the tugs, and at Bill Stagg's boat with its cage of fire, as it went in and about among the shipping; I looked at the bills on the wall, where new tales of men and women Found Drowned displaced those of a week ago; and I fell again into the wonderment and conjecture they always prompted; and last I turned up the alley, though whether to look out on the street or to stop at the bar-parlour door, I had not determined. As I went, I grew aware of a tall, florid man with thick boots and very large whiskers, who stood at the entry, and regarded me with a wide and ingratiating smile. I had some cloudy remembrance of having seen him before, walking in the street of Wapping Wall; and, as he seemed to be coming to meet me, I went on past the bar-parlour door to meet him. "Ah!" he said with a slight glance toward the door, "you're a smart fellow, I can see." And he patted my head and stooped. "Now I've got something to show you. See there!" He pulled a watch from his pocket and opened it. I was much interested to see that the inward part swung clear out from the case, on a hinge, exactly as I had seen happen with another watch on my first evening at the Hole in the Wall. "That's a rum trick, ain't it?" observed the stranger, smiling wider than ever. I assented, and thanked him for the demonstration. "Ah," he replied, "you're as clever a lad as ever I see; but I lay you never see a watch like that before?" "Yes, I did," I answered heartily. "I saw one once." "No, no," said the florid man, still toying with the watch, "I don't believe that--it's your gammon. Why, where did you see one?" He shot another stealthy glance toward the bar-parlour door as he said it, and the glance was so unlike the smile that my sleeping caution was alarmed. I remembered how my grandfather had come by the watch with the M on the back; and I remember his repeated warnings that I must not talk. "----Why, where did you see one?" asked the stranger. "In a man's hand," I said, with stolid truth. He looked at me so sharply through his grin that I had an uncomfortable feeling that I had somehow let out the secret after all. But I resolved to hold on tight. "Ha! ha!" he laughed, "in a man's hand, of course! I knew you was a smart one. Mine hasn't got any letter on the back, you see."