the little knots of guests and loungers; if "Karl" were among them, he was nobody whom Lanyard had learned to know by sight on board the Assyrian.
With as little success he searched unobtrusively all public rooms on the main floor.
It was, of course, both possible and probable that "Karl," himself a guest of the hotel, had crossed directly to the elevators and been whisked aloft to his room.
With this in mind, Lanyard paused at the desk, asked permission to examine the register and, being accommodated, was somewhat consoled; if his chase had failed of its immediate objective, it now proved not altogether fruitless. A majority of the Assyrian survivors seemed to have elected to stop at the Knickerbocker. One after another Lanyard, scanning the entries, found these names:
- Edmund O'Reilly—Detroit
- Arturo Velasco—Buenos Aires
- Bartlett Putnam—Philadelphia
- Cecelia Brooke—London
- Emil Dressier—Genève
Half inclined to commit the imprudence of sending a name up to Miss Brooke—any name but André Duchemin, Michael Lanyard, or Anthony Ember—together with a message artfully worded to fix her interest without giving comfort to the enemy, should it chance to go astray, the adventurer hesitated by the desk; and of a sudden was satisfied that such a move would be not only injudicious but waste of time; for, now that he paused to think of it, he surmised that the young woman—"young and good-looking", on Walker's word—who had
