a
gentleman jockey. The landlord looked at him curiously. Five minutes
later, on a trivial excuse, he returned and again studied Jimmie as
closely as though he were about to paint his portrait. Then two of the
other boarders, chums of the landlord, knocked at the door, to borrow a
match, to beg the loan of the morning paper. Each was obviously excited,
each stared accusingly. Jimmie fell into a panic. He felt that if
already his identity was questioned, than hiding in his room and growing
a beard nothing could be more suspicious. At noon, for West Indian
ports, a German boat was listed to sail from the Twenty-fourth Street
wharf. Jimmie decided at once to sail with her and, until his beard was
grown, not to return. It was necessary first to escape the suspicious
landlord, and to that end he noiselessly packed his trunk and suit-case.
In front of the house, in an unending procession, taxi-cabs returning
empty from the Twenty-third Street ferry passed the door, and from the
street Jimmie hailed one. Before the landlord could voice his doubts
Jimmie was on the sidewalk, his bill had been paid, and, giving the
address of a hotel on Fourteenth Street, he was away.
At the Fourteenth Street hotel Jimmie dismissed the taxi-cab and asked
for a room adjoining an imaginary Senator Gates. When the clerk told him
Senator Gates was not at that hotel, Jimmie excitedly demanded to be led
to the telephone. He telephoned the office of the steamship line: and,
in the name of Henry Hull, secured a cabin. Then he explained to the
clerk that over the telephone he had learned that his friend, Senator
Gates, was at another hotel. He regretted that he must follow him.
Another taxi was called, and Jimmie drove to an inconspicuous and
old-fashioned hotel on the lower East Side, patronized exclusively by
gunmen. There, in not finding Senator Gates, he was again disappointed,
and now having broken the link that connected him with the suspicious
landlord, he drove back to within a block of his original starting-point
and went on board the ship. Not until she was off Sandy Hook did he
leave his cabin.
It was July, and passengers to the tropics were few; and when Jimmie
ventured on deck he found most of them gathered at the port rail. They
were gazing intently over the ship's side. Thinking the pilot might be
leaving, Jimmie joined them. A young man in a yachting-cap was pointing
north and speaking in the voice of a conductor of a "seeing New York"
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