He saw Nan and The Laird enter into earnest conversation, and his curiosity mastering him, he ventured to inquire of a roustabout who was loading baggage on a truck who the young lady might be.  Upon receiving the desired information, he, with difficulty repressed a whistle of amazement and understanding; instantly his active imagination was at work.

The girl was leaving Port Agnew.  That was evident.  Also, The Laird must have known of this, for he had reached the station before the girl and waited for her.  Therefore, he must have had something to do with inducing her to depart.  Mr. O’Leary concluded that it was quite within the realm of possibility that The Laird had made it well worth her while to refrain from wrecking the honor of his house, and he watched narrowly to observe whether or not money passed between them.

One thing puzzled Dirty Dan extremely.  That was the perfectly frank, friendly manner in which his employer and this outcast woman greeted each other, the earnestness with which they conversed, and the effect of the woman’s low-spoken words upon the color of Hector McKaye’s face.  When The Laird took his leave, the lumberjack noted the increased respect—­the emotion, even—­with which he parted from her.  The lumberjack heard him say, “Good-by, my dear, and good luck to you wherever you go”; so it was obvious Nan Brent was not coming back to Port Agnew.  Knowing what he knew, Mr. O’Leary decided that, upon the whole, here was good riddance to the McKaye family of rubbish that might prove embarrassing if permitted to remain dumped on the Sawdust Pile.

“Poor gurrl,” he reflected as he followed Nan aboard the train.  “She have a sweet face, that she have, God forgive her!  An be th’ Rock av Cashel, she have a v’ice like an angel from heaven.”

He sat down in a seat behind her and across the aisle, and all the way to Seattle he stared at the back of her neck or the beautiful rounded profile of her cheek.  From time to time, he wondered how much Hector McKaye had paid her to disappear out of his son’s life, and how that son would feel, and what he would say to his father when he discovered his light o’ love had flown the cage.

The following morning Mr. O’Leary boarded a tourist-sleeper on the Canadian Pacific, and, to his profound amazement, discovered that Nan Brent and her child occupied a section in the same car.

“Begorra, she couldn’t have shtuck the ould man very deep at that, or ‘tis in a standard shleeper an’ not a tourist she’d be riding,” he reflected.  “What the divil’s up here at all, at all, I dunno.”

Dirty Dan saw her enter a taxicab at the Grand Central Station in New York.

“I wonder if the young Caddyheck himself’ll meet her here,” Mr. O’Leary reflected, alive with sudden suspicion, and springing into the taxicab that drew in at the stand the instant the taxi bearing Nan and her child pulled out, he directed the driver to follow the car ahead, and in due course found himself before the entrance to a hotel in lower Broadway—­one of that fast disappearing number of fifth-class hotels which were first-class thirty years ago.