Filled with these ideas, then, which rose naturally up in his mind
without his taking the trouble, as it were, definitely to prove
them, Gilbert Gildersleeve hurried on through the crowded streets
of Plymouth town, till he reached the office of the London and
South African Steamship Company. There he entered with an air of
decided business, and asked to take a passage to Cape Town at once
by the steamer "Cetewayo", due to call at Plymouth, outward bound,
that evening. He had looked up particulars of sailing in the
papers at the hotel, and asked now, as if for himself, for a large
and roomy berth, with all his usual self-possession and boldness
of manner. The clerk gazed at him carelessly; that big and burly
man with the great awkward hands raised no picture in his brain of
the supposed murderer of McGregor in the wood at Mambury as that
murderer had been described to him by the police that morning, from
a verbal portrait after the landlord of the Talbot Arms. This
colossal, red-faced, loud-spoken person, who required a large
and roomy berth, was certainly "not" the rather slim young man, a
little above the medium height, with a dark moustache and a gentle
musical voice, whom the inn-keeper had seen in an excited mood on
the hunt for McGregor along the slopes of Dartmoor.
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