41 Lure O Gold 1904

The Lure o
Gold
hold as to escape all the prying eyes that might be
searching for them.
But when Doctor Quaritch and I
went down into
the steerage, and I sat aft near the starboard corner,
while the Doctor made an examination of his patient, I
looked into the dimly lighted angle, and there, at a
table, playing at cribbage and smoking their pipes,
sat Pete Slattery and the little
pink-faced man, as cool
as you please.
The poet
still had his head bandaged in a way to
conceal his blind eye, but the pink-faced man had made
no attempt to disguise himself,
probably relying upon
the fact that he was unknown to the miners aboard the
vessel.
Without the long parka and its high collar, which he
had worn the previous night,
it was easy for me to
recognize the form and the face of Slattery,
and I won
dered if
he really had thought of deceiving people by
his attempt to conceal the loss of his eye.
It might
have been the bandage was merely intended to aid the
poet in getting aboard in the night, when he had thought
that any sort of disguise, however slight, might safely
be relied upon.
Once aboard and settled down in the
steerage it may have been that he was a little more care-
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