The Castle Of The Shadows

by A. M. Williamson

Now, suddenly, when all such peril was over, the thought of that slimy, cold touch on his flesh, and what it had meant, turned George Trent sick. He did not see how he or his friends had escaped the horror. If it were to come again he was sure that escape would be impossible; and somehow he knew, as if by prevision, that there would be nights so long as he lived when he would dream of that touch in the water, and wrench himself awake, with sweat on his forehead and his hands damp.

"Roger, are you all right, and Dalahaide, too?" he asked, wondering at the weight he felt on his chest and the effort it was to speak.

"Thanks to Dalahaide, I am all right," Roger answered. "If it hadn't been for his quickness and presence of mind, twice I should have been nabbed by a shark. Weak as he was, he pulled me down for a dive that I should have been too dazed to think of without him."

"I have cause enough to know something of these waters and their danger," Maxime said slowly, as if he too found it an effort to speak. "I was weak, yes, but strength comes of great need, I suppose; and already I owed you so much. I had to think and act quickly; besides, it was for myself too."

"Thank heaven it's all over," exclaimed Roger, with a great sigh. "We've a good doctor on board. He'll know how to make you fit once we have you there. And that will be shortly now. See, here's the yacht! In ten minutes you'll be in the stateroom that has been ready for you ever since we left Mentone a few hundred years ago, bound for New Caledonia."

"Yes, your passage was engaged from the first," chuckled George, with an odd little catch in his voice that would have been hysterical if he had been a woman. "And I'll bet something you'll like your quarters. Two lovely ladies took a lot of trouble with them—your sister and mine."

"I don't know what to say, or how to thank you," stammered Maxime. "It goes so far beyond words."

"Just try to live your thanks, if you think they're worth while. I reckon that's what our two sisters would say on the subject. Don't let there be any more talk about dying like there was to-day, that's all, you know. And oh, by Jove! doesn't it feel queer to be gabbling this way, when you remember what we've just come out of—those grinning brutes down there, with their red mouths in their white shirt fronts, so to speak. Ugh! I don't want to think of it, but I'm hanged if I can help it. I say, did those Johnnies' revolvers do any damage here?"

"Dalahaide got a bullet in his shoulder, as if the wound in his back wasn't enough to remember the place by," said Roger. "He says it's nothing, and I hope that's the truth" (he actually did hope it now, at least for the moment); "as for me, I believe they've saved the yacht's barber a little trouble in cutting my hair on the left side, that's all; luckily no harm done to any of our men."

All these scraps of conversation had been flung backward and forward inside five minutes. Then they were at the yacht's side. Maxime, forced to yield to his own weakness in the reaction now, was being helped on board, the others following.