FullReads

“Well, one night, Auguste, the headwaiter–you remember him, he used to get smuggled cigarettes for us; that made him suspicious; always thought everybody was a spy–pointed out a man sitting just outside the room on one of the leather-covered seats. Auguste said he came every evening and got as close as he could to our table without attracting attention; close enough, however, to hear every word that was said. If I knew the man it was all right; if I didn’t know him, he suggested that I keep an eye on him.

“I looked around, and saw a heavy-featured, dull-looking man about twenty-five, dressed in a good suit of well-cut clothes, shiny stove-pipe silk hat, high collar with a good deal of necktie, a big pearl pin, and a long gold watch-chain which went all around his neck like an eye-glass ribbon. He had a smooth-shaven face, two keen eyes, a flat nose, square jaw, and a straight line of a mouth.

“I didn’t know the man, didn’t want to know him, fellows in silk hate not being popular with us, and I didn’t keep an eye on him except long enough to satisfy myself that the man was only one of those hungry travellers who was adding to his stock of information by picking up the crumbs of conversation which fell from the tables, and not at all the kind of a person who would hold me or anybody else up in a sotto portico or chuck me over a bridge. Then again, I was twenty pounds heavier than he was, and could take care of myself.

“Some nights after this I was dining alone, none of the boys having shown up owing to a heavy rain, when Auguste nudged me, and there sat this stranger within ten feet of my table. He dropped his eyes when he saw me looking at him, and began turning the sheets of a letter he had in his hand. I was smoking one of Auguste’s cigarettes, and checking the menu with a lead-pencil, when it slipped from my hand and rolled between the man’s feet. He rose, picked up the pencil, laid it beside my plate, and without a word returned to his seat, that same curious, inquisitive, hungry look on his face you saw a moment ago on that fellow’s who has just gone out. Auguste, of course, lost all interest in my dinner. If he wasn’t after me then he was after him; both meant trouble for Auguste.

“I shifted my chair, opened the ‘Gazetta’ to serve as a screen, and looked the fellow over. If he were following me around to murder me, as Auguste concluded–he always had some cock-and-bull story to tell–he was certainly very polite about it. I could see that he was not an Italian, neither was he a German nor a Frenchman. He looked more like a well-to-do Dutchman–like one of those young fellows you and I used to see at the Harmonie Club in Dordrecht, or on the veranda of the Amstel, in Amsterdam. They look more like Americans than any other people in Europe.

“The next night I was telling the fellows some stories, they crowding about to listen, when Auguste whispered in my ear. I turned, and there he was again, his eyes watching every mouthful I swallowed, his ears taking in everything that was said. The other fellows had noticed him now, and had christened him ‘Marny’s Shadow.’ One of them wanted to ask him his business, and fire him into the street if it wasn’t satisfactory, but I wouldn’t have it. He had said nothing to me or anybody else, nor had he, so far as I knew, followed me when I went out. He had a perfect right to dine where he pleased if he paid for it–and he did–so Auguste admitted, and liberally, too. He could look at whom he pleased. The fact is, that but for Auguste, who was scared white half the time, fearing the Government would get on to his cigarette game, no one would have noticed him. Besides, the fellow might have his own reasons for remaining incog., and if he did we all knew he wouldn’t have been the first one.