?) What can be his position, and what is his business
here at the present moment, I wonder?" he went on, speaking more to
himself than to his companion, as they turned down Bleecker from
Broadway towards Leslie's lodgings, on Bleecker near Elm.

"Well, but you have not yet told me his name, or any thing about him,
while you go on tantalizing me with speculations as to how he came to
be here, and what he is doing!" said Harding.

"True enough," answered Leslie. "Well, he is not the sort of man to talk
about loosely in the streets; so wait a moment, until I use my night-key
and we get up into my room. There we can smoke a cigar, and I will tell
you all I know of him, which is just enough to excite my wonder to a
much greater height than your own."

Less than five minutes sufficed to fulfil the conditions prescribed; and
in Leslie's little room, himself occupying the three chairs it
contained, by sitting in one, and stretching out his two legs on the
others, while Harding threw off his coat and lounged on the bed, Leslie
poured out his story, and the smoke from his cigar, with about equal
rapidity.

"The name of that singular man," he said, "is Dexter Balston, and he is
by birth a Virginian. You heard the girl call him 'Deck,' which you no
doubt took to be 'Dick,' but which she really meant as a familiar
abbreviation of his name. It is a little singular that I should have met
him first at a theatre, and not far from the one at which we just now
encountered him. It was in the fall of 1857, I think, going in with a
party of friends, one night, to Laura Keene's, that one of the ladies of
the party was rudely jostled by a large man, who caught his foot in the
matting of the vestibule and fell against her with such violence as
nearly to throw her to the floor. He turned and apologized at once, and
with so much high-toned and gentlemanly dignity, that all the party felt
almost glad that the little accident had occurred. This made the first
step of an acquaintance between him and myself; and when, in the
intermission the same evening, I met him for a few moments in a saloon
near the theatre, we drank together, held some slight conversation,
exchanged cards, and each invited the other to call at his lodgings. His
card lies somewhere in the bureau there at this moment, and it read, I
remember, 'Dexter Ralston, Charles City, Virginia,' with 'St. Nicholas'
written in pencil in the corner. He was a wealthy planter, living near
Cha