In the face of the disbelief that had met my denials of any secret mission, I felt to have Schnitzel also disbelieve me would be too great a humiliation.  So I remained silent.

“You make your report to the State Department,” he explained, “and I make mine to—­my people.  Who they are doesn’t matter.  You’d like to know, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but—­that’s my secret.”

My only feelings were a desire to kick Schnitzel heavily, but for Schnitzel to suspect that was impossible.  Rather, he pictured me as shaken by his disclosures.

As he hung over the rail the glare of the sun on the tumbling water lit up his foolish, mongrel features, exposed their cunning, their utter lack of any character, and showed behind the shifty eyes the vacant, half-crooked mind.

Schnitzel was smiling to himself with a smile of complete self-satisfaction.  In the light of his later conduct, I grew to understand that smile.  He had anticipated a rebuff, and he had been received, as he read it, with consideration.  The irony of my politeness he had entirely missed.  Instead, he read in what I said the admiration of the amateur for the professional.  He saw what he believed to be a high agent of the Government treating him as a worthy antagonist.  In no other way can I explain his later heaping upon me his confidences.  It was the vanity of a child trying to show off.

In ten days, in the limited area of a two-thousand-ton steamer, one could not help but learn something of the history of so communicative a fellow-passenger as Schnitzel.  His parents were German and still lived in Germany.  But he himself had been brought up on the East Side.  An uncle who kept a delicatessen shop in Avenue A had sent him to the public schools and then to a “business college,” where he had developed remarkable expertness as a stenographer.  He referred to his skill in this difficult exercise with pitying contempt.  Nevertheless, from a room noisy with typewriters this skill had lifted him into the private office of the president of the Nitrate Trust.  There, as Schnitzel expressed it, “I saw ‘mine,’ and I took it.”  To trace back the criminal instinct that led Schnitzel to steal and sell the private letters of his employer was not difficult.  In all of his few early years I found it lying latent.  Of every story he told of himself, and he talked only of himself, there was not one that was not to his discredit.  He himself never saw this, nor that all he told me showed he was without the moral sense, and with an instinctive enjoyment of what was deceitful, mean, and underhand.  That, as I read it, was his character.

[Illustration:  Schnitzel was smiling to himself]

In appearance he was smooth-shaven, with long locks that hung behind wide, protruding ears.  He had the unhealthy skin of bad blood, and his eyes, as though the daylight hurt them, constantly opened and shut.  He was like hundreds of young men that you see loitering on upper Broadway and making predatory raids along the Rialto.  Had you passed him in that neighborhood you would have set him down as a wire-tapper, a racing tout, a would-be actor.