pins, needles, hooks, eyes, buttons and bodkins displayed upon a tray by this individual he proceeded to rummage.
“Have you seen the paper this morning?” inquired the pedler in Greek, as if conversation with this fine young man were more to him than commerce.
“I have seen the paper, Yorghi,” replied the fine young man. His own name, I might inform you, was Anastass.
“Well?”
“Well! It says what it says every day—that he is dying.”
“Holy saints!” exclaimed the pedler. “If”
At that moment a second customer arrived and began to fumble in company with Anastass. The young man thereupon withdrew from the field.
“I don’t find anything,” he said, fixing Yorghi with his eye; “I am going over to the other side.”
The pedler, a powerful fellow with the well-shaped head, the narrow brow, and the un-Oriental nose of his people, kept him in disappointed view until he was lost in the crowd. As for Anastass, he lost nothing of his careless pace. Threading his way through the motley multitude he passed in turn the landings of the various steamer companies which have termini at the Bridge. Before reaching the Stamboul end, however, he found occasion to approach another pedler.
“How is business, Dimitri?” he asked, fingering the shoestrings which hung in a great sheaf from the man’s arm.
“Would I be here if there were business?” demanded the pedler. “I watch until I am blind, and never a soul do I see. I don’t believe he exists.”
“He must exist!” laughed Anastass. “He shall exist! And you will see him better if you stand a little farther over, there, where the people spread out more after leaving the steamers.”
“Well, perhaps he does exist,” grumbled Dimitri as he changed his post. “But that does us no good if he hasn’t the sense to come in time.”
“He must have the sense! He shall have the sense!” laughed Anastass again, patting the other’s shoulder. “And if he hasn’t, why—we have enough to manage it in spite of him. Good-by. I’ll see you to-night if not before.”
With which our fine young man moved away. He did not move, however, in the direction one would have expected him to take. Instead of proceeding to Stamboul he retraced his steps toward Galata. And then again he performed the unexpected. He went down the first stairway leading to the landing of the Mahsousseh boats, walked to the café commanding the view of both approaches, and established himself at a table whose waiter greeted him as a habitué. Although he was promptly provided with coffee and paper, neither seemed much to occupy him. Indeed, neither could have occupied him for so long as he stayed. What seemed to interest him was watching the people as they passed—people going to and coming from the steamers. What was a little curious about it, though, was that he did not watch like a mere spectator. He did not allow his eye to be caught, to follow a figure until it disappeared, and then to wander idly back. He seemed to watch with an idea. He let no face escape him. Sometimes he leaned out of his chair for a better view of one that was partly hidden. But he did not scrutinize. He did not hesitate. There was no uncertainty about it. It was like one who turns over a pack of cards looking for the joker.
III
Why it was that Anastass chose as his coign of observation that particular café of that particular landing could scarcely have been told by an outsider to his idea. Those asthmatic steamers, wreckage of prouder days upon the Danube and the Thames, which ply on broken wing between the city, the Princes’ Islands, and the sunny Gulf of Nicomedia—why were they more to his purpose than the swift ferries of the Bosphorus? But that there was matter to his idea was proven at the end of the morning on which we make his acquaintance. For suddenly leaving his seat he made after someone in the stream of passengers issuing from the Prinkipo boat.
This was an old man—the most wonderful, the most beautiful old man whom one could possibly imagine. From his dress it would have been difficult to make him out—which indeed Anastass found. It was not exactly clerical, yet it was not quite