one o'clock
Now , although he observed far more than did Jack , he felt somewhat at a loss ; the realization that Mary Johnson might pass him unrecognized troubled him greatly . It did not once occur to him that he , with his gray Stetson hat and his brown face and keen eyes and tall , straight-backed figure , looked not at all like the thousands of men all around him , so that many eyes turned to give him another glance when he passed . Mary Johnson must be unobserving in the extreme if she failed to know him , once she glimpsed him in the crowd . Somewhere near one o'clock he lost Jack completely , and drifted aimlessly alone . Jack had been hailed by a friend , had stopped for a minute to talk , and several hundred men , women and children had come between him and Andy , pushing and crowding and surging , because a band had started playing somewhere . Andy got down the steps and out upon the sand , and Jack was thereafter but a memory . He found the loose sand hard walking with his lame leg , and almost as crowded as the promenade , and as he stood for a minute looking up at the board walk above him , it occurred to him that if he could get somewhere and stay there long enough , every human being at the Casino would eventually pass by him .