I saw them
rushing around making inquiries. I don't know what they would have
done to the girl, but they seemed quite ready to fall upon your Heyst,
Davidson, and kill him on the quay."
He had never, he said, seen anything so queer. Those two investigators
working feverishly to the same end were glaring at each other with
surprising ferocity. In hatred and mistrust they entered a steam-launch,
and went flying from ship to ship all over the harbour, causing no end
of sensation. The captains of vessels, coming on shore later in the day,
brought tales of a strange invasion, and wanted to know who were the two
offensive lunatics in a steam-launch, apparently after a man and a girl,
and telling a story of which one could make neither head nor tail. Their
reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the
point of the mate of an American ship bundling them out over the rail
with unseemly precipitation.
Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone in
the night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the eastward.
This was known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom Heyst hired
for the purpose at three o'clock in the morning. The Tesman schooner had
sailed at daylight with the usual land breeze, and was probably still in
sight in the offing at the time. However, the two pursuers after their
experience with the American mate, made for the shore.
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