He took it up and read it; while he read, I took my pencil from my pocket and wrote on the blank slip of paper, which I had found in the pocket-book, the message that Mouraki’s brain had surely conceived, though his fingers had grown stiff in death before they could write it.
‘What does all this mean?’ asked the captain, looking up as he finished reading.
‘And to-morrow,’ said I, ‘I think another message would have gone to Rhodes—’
‘I had orders to be ready to go myself to-morrow.’
‘You had?’ I cried. ‘And what would you have carried?’
‘That I don’t know.’
‘Aye, but I do. There’s your cargo!’ And I flung down what I had written.
He read it once and again, and looked across the table at me, fingering the slip of paper.
‘He did not write this?’ he said.
‘As you saw, I wrote it. If he had lived, then, as surely as I live, he would have written it. Captain, it was for me that dagger was meant. Else why did he take the man Demetri with him? Had Demetri cause to love him, or he cause to trust Demetri?’