"The
cowardly desperado"--such, I remember, was the editorial expression--was
supposed to have escaped with a large part of this mysterious fund still
in his possession.
I was still brooding over the fact, and trying to torture it into some
connection with Mr. Huddlestone's danger, when a man entered the tavern
and asked for some bread and cheese with a decided foreign accent.
"_Siete Italiano_?" said I.
"_Si, Signor_," was his reply.
I said it was unusually far north to find one of his compatriots; at which
he shrugged his shoulders, and replied that a man would go anywhere to
find work. What work he could hope to find at Graden Wester, I was totally
unable to conceive; and the incident struck so unpleasantly upon my mind,
that I asked the landlord, while he was counting me some change, whether
he had ever before seen an Italian in the village. He said he had once
seen some Norwegians, who had been shipwrecked on the other side of Graden
Ness and rescued by the lifeboat from Cauldhaven.
"No!" said I; "but an Italian, like the man who has just had bread and
cheese."
"What?" cried he, "yon black-avised fellow wi' the teeth? Was he an
I-talian? Weel, yon's the first that ever I saw, an' I dare say he's like
to be the last."
Even as he was speaking, I raised my eyes, and, casting a glance into the
street, beheld three men in earnest conversation together, and not thirty
yards away.
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