II
Kestner, no longer wearing his pink cock's comb and his arm-sling, stared over the ship's rail as his liner, having slipped through Quarantine a few minutes before sunset, crept from the Upper Bay into the narrower reaches of the North River. He stared disconsolately at the city of his birth, depressed by that thin misery which so often returns to the traveller who remembers that he has become a man without a country.
"So that's New York!" sighed Wilsnach, close beside him at the ship's rail.
Kestner continued to look at the precipitous skyline of the city shouldering up into the misty evening light, the incomparable outline of man's effort and aspiration. Yet he looked at it only as a hunter stares into an unbroken woodland.
Somewhere in that undecipherable warren of steel and stone lurked the fugitives whom it was his duty to find. Somewhere amid that tangle and welter of life, he remembered, were Lambert and Lambert's daughter. And the whole aim and object of Kestner's existence, once that liner had docked, was to seek out this perilous pair and protect that undreaming city from their attacks.
"And we've lost a week!" persisted the still melancholy-minded Wilsnach, whose thoughts had obviously followed the same line as Kestner's.
94
