Presently after my friend overtook and passed me on a hired steed which seemed to scorn its cavalier; and I was left in the dust of his passage, a prey to whirling thoughts.

For I now stood, or seemed to stand, on the immediate threshold of these mysteries.

I knew the name of the man Dickson--his name was Carthew; I knew where the money came from that opposed us at the sale--it was part of Carthew's inheritance; and in my gallery of illustrations to the history of the wreck, one more picture hung; perhaps the most dramatic of the series.
It showed me the deck of a warship in that distant part of the great ocean, the officers and seamen looking curiously on; and a man of birth and education, who had been sailing under an alias on a trading brig, and was now rescued from desperate peril, felled like an ox by the bare sound of his own name.

I could not fail to be reminded of my own experience at the Occidental telephone.

The hero of three styles, Dickson, Goddedaal, or Carthew, must be the owner of a lively--or a loaded--conscience, and the reflection recalled to me the photograph found on board the Flying Scud; just such a man, I reasoned, would be capable of just such starts and crises, and I inclined to think that Goddedaal (or Carthew) was the mainspring of the mystery.
One thing was plain: as long as the Tempest was in reach, I must make the acquaintance of both Sebright and the doctor.