I shall give you my portable electric lamp for reading in the train. You may find it useful. Only don’t fall asleep. When the row begins I shall come on.’
‘I see,’ said Merton. ‘But look here! Suppose you slip out of your own room, locking the door quietly, and into mine, where you can snore, you know—I snore myself—in case anybody takes a fancy to see whether I am asleep? Leave your dog in your own room, he snores, all Spanish bull-dogs do.’
‘Yes, that will serve,’ said Logan. ‘Merton, your mind is not wholly inactive.’
They had some whisky and soda-water, and carried out the manœuvres on which they had decided.
Merton, unshod, silently re-entered the smoking-room, his shoes in his hand; Logan as tactfully occupied Merton’s room, and then they waited. Presently, the smoking-room door being slightly ajar, Merton heard Logan snoring very naturally; the Spanish bull-dog was yet more sonorous. Gianesi came in, walked upstairs to his bedroom, and shut his door; in half an hour he also was snoring; it was a nasal trio.
Merton ‘drove the night along,’ like Dr. Johnson, by repeating Latin and other verses. He dared not turn on the light of his portable electric lamp and read; he was afraid to smoke; he heard the owls towhitting and towhooing from the woods, and the clock on the Castle tower striking the quarters and the hours.
One o’clock passed, two o’clock passed, a quarter after two, then the bell of the wireless machine rang,
the machine began to tick; Merton sat tight, listening. All the curtains of the windows were drawn, the room was almost perfectly dark; the snorings had sometimes lulled, sometimes revived. Merton lay behind the curtains on the window-seat, facing the door. He knew, almost without the help of his ears, that the door was slowly, slowly opening. Something entered, something paused, something stole silently towards the wireless machine, and paused again. Then a glow suffused the further end of the room, a disc of electric light, clearly from a portable lamp. A draped form, in deep shadow, was exposed to Merton’s view. He stole forward on tiptoe with noiseless feet; he leaped on the back of the figure, threw his left arm round its neck, caught its right wrist in a grip of steel, and yelled:
‘Mr. Eachain of the Hairy Arm, if I am not mistaken!’
At the same moment there came a click, the electric light was switched on, Logan bounced on to the figure, tore away a revolver from the right hand of which Merton held the wrist, and the two fell on the floor above a struggling Highland warrior in the tartans of the Macraes. The figure was thrown on its face.