we got to Hull that
night, late--too late to do more than eat our suppers and go to bed at
the Station Hotel. And we took things leisurely next morning,
breakfasting late and strolling through the older part of the town
before, as noon drew near, we approached the Goose and Crane. We had
an object in selecting time and place. Fish had told us that the man
whom he had seen in company with our particular quarry, the supposed
Baxter, had come into the queer old inn in his shirt-sleeves and
without his hat--he was therefore probably some neighbouring shop or
store-keeper, and in the habit of turning into the ancient hostelry
for a drink about noon. Such a man--that man--Scarterfield hoped to
encounter. Out of him, if he met him, he could hope to get some news.
Although, as a boy, I had often seen the street front of the Goose and
Crane, I had never passed its portals. Now, entering it, we found it
to be even more curious inside than it was out. It was a fine relic of
Tudor days--a rabbit warren of snug rooms, old furniture, wide chimney
places, tiled floors; if the folk who lived in it and the men who
frequented it had only worn the right sorts of costume, we might
easily have thought ourselves to be back in "Elizabethan times." We
easily found the particular room of which Solomon Fish had
spoken--there was the door, half open, with its legend on an upper
panel in faded gilt letters, "For Master Mariners Only." But, as we
had inferred, that warning had been set up in the old days, and was no
longer a strict observance; we went into the room unquestioned by
guardians or occupants, and calling for refreshments, sat ourselves
down to watch and wait.
There were several men in this quaint old parlour; all seemed, in one
degree or another, to be connected with the sea. Men, thick-set,
sturdy, bronzed, branded in solid suits of good blue cloth, all with
that look in the eye which stamps the seafarer. Other men whom one
supposed to have something to do with sea-trade--ship's chandlers,
perhaps, or shipping-agents. We caught stray whiffs of talk--it was
all about the life of the port and of the wide North Sea that
stretches away from the Humber. And in the middle of this desultory
and apparently aimless business in came a man who, I am sure from my
first glimpse of him, was the very man we wanted. A shortish,
stiffly-built, paunchy man, with a beefy face, shrewd eyes, and a
bristling, iron-gray moustache; a well-dressed man, and
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