The idea, of a sudden, struck me as being so ludicrous that I laughed. The mere thought of any such maneuver was too much for me—the foolish hope that a homeopathic little pill of chloral would put me under the table, like any shopgirl lured from a dance-hall! They were trying to drug me. Drug me, who had taken double and triple doses night after night as I fought for sleep!
They were trying to drug me, me who on my bad nights had even known the narcotic to be forcibly wrested from my clutch by those who stood appalled at the quantities that my too-immured system demanded, and knew only too well that in time it meant madness!
But I remembered, as I saw the three men staring at me, that I still had a rôle to sustain. I knew it would be unwise to let those sweet worthies know just how the land lay. I enjoyed an advantage much too exceptional and much too valuable to be lightly surrendered.
So to all outward signs and appearances I let the drug do its work. I carefully acted out my pretended lapse into somnolent indifference. I lost the power to coordinate; my speech grew inarticulate; my shoulders drooped forward across the table edge. I wilted down like a cut dock-weed, until my face lay flat against the beer-stained wood.
"He's off," murmured the man called Chuck. He rose to his feet as he spoke.
"Then we got to beat it," declared the youth named Tony, already on his feet. I could hear him take a deep breath as he stood there. "And the next long nose who gives me heart disease like this is goin' to get five inches o' cold steel!"
He knelt before me as he spoke, pulled back my feet, and ran a knife edge along the shoe laces. Then he promptly pulled the shoes from my feet. These shoes, apparently, he kept in his hand. "That'll help anchor 'im, I guess," I heard him remark.
"Let's get on the job," suggested the big man, obviously impatient at the delay. "If there's nothin' but five inches o' plank between us and that gold, let's get busy!"
I sat there, with my head on that table top so redolent of the soured beverages of other days, and listened to them as they moved across the room. I listened as they passed out and swung the door shut behind them. I waited there for another minute or two, without moving, knowing only too well what a second discovery would entail.
My head was still bent over that unclean table top when I heard the broken-latched door once more pushed slowly open, and steps slowly cross the floor to where I sat.