"What—what?" sputtered the portly guest, seeming to collect himself with difficulty, and not till Jardine had repeated the question was he able to speak coherently. "Mean by what, my good sir?"
"Mean by letting that fellow go at large?" Jardine hissed out. He stood erect at a little distance leaning on the high back of one of the vacant rocking-chairs, and as his hands now and again quivered, responsive to the surge of excitement in his mind, the chair swayed slightly, and then was still again.
The portly guest stared with unavailing intentness, as if he sought with the physical eye to discern the mystery. Then he looked around at the group as if they, knowing Jardine, might be able to explain him. But they remained silent in blank astonishment; even the automata of the chess table turned dismayed and startled faces, and the knights and castles and pawns had surcease of their schemings for the nonce.
"What fellow?" gasped the stranger, seeming to doubt his senses. He burnt his fingers with the lighted end of his cigar in inadvertent handling, and he let it fall to the hearth unheeded.
"That fellow Lloyd—what do you mean by letting him go at large?" Jardine reiterated his question.
"My God, sir—he is perfectly sane—do you suppose that I am his keeper?"
"No, I do not—I most certainly do not suppose that you are any such thing," Jardine replied with a significance not to be mistaken.
The portly stranger was recovering his composure. Under other circumstances he might have thought that Jardine was himself mentally unbalanced, but he had already noted him on the journey that day with the keen observation that little escaped, and he was aware that there must needs be other methods of accounting for his demonstration.
"I will tell you what I suppose that you and he are," Jardine declared. He had utterly lost his own self-control—he was tingling with the long-repressed irritation, vented at last and utterly beyond his power to check.
"Let me warn you, sir," said the newcomer, with a certain menacing dignity in his look, "how you dare asperse either that gentleman or myself." Then with a sudden, sinister, chuckling laugh, "He is more than capable physically of resenting any injury, and I tell you now that if you slander me I will have the law of you."