noon
Theodore Racksole had no satisfactory means of identifying the steam launch which carried away Mr Tom Jackson . The sky had clouded over soon after midnight , and there was also a slight mist , and he had only been able to make out that it was a low craft , about sixty feet long , probably painted black . He had personally kept a watch all through the night on vessels going upstream , and during the next morning he had a man to take his place who warned him whenever a steam launch went towards Westminster . At noon , after his conversation with Prince Aribert , he went down the river in a hired row-boat as far as the Custom House , and poked about everywhere , in search of any vessel which could by any possibility be the one he was in search of . But he found nothing . He was , therefore , tolerably sure that the mysterious launch lay somewhere below the Custom House . At the Custom House stairs , he landed , and asked for a very high official -- an official inferior only to a Commissioner -- whom he had entertained once in New York , and who had met him in London on business at Lloyd 's .