“Quite so, Tsuda. Nevertheless, I think you’d better give us the gun.”
The duel of eyes continued, each holding the other. It became more primitive from moment to moment.
“The gun, Captain?”
Not all his cleverness was quite equal to the task of maintaining, in presence of this awful poker stare, a convincing mask of innocence. His life might depend on his holding the Captain’s eyes; but it was an ordeal beyond his powers. He faltered. Suddenly, however, a great light broke across the lined old face with its strangely youthful eyes, and he explained: “It was a present—from Wife-of-the-Kami. I guess what you call it—gn—a keepsake!” And he brought out then, in triumph, the island’s only revolver, handling the little weapon as a child would a cherished toy.
The Captain didn’t fail to appreciate it all: the light of triumph, the fondness; still he insisted, quietly but with an undertone of iron firmness: “You’d better give it to Mr. Sutherland. Keepsakes are sometimes dangerous, Tsuda. I must have neglected to warn you.”
Tsuda shivered a little with terror and foreboding. However, Captain Utterbourne made no further comment in this connection.
“I’m going in alone,” the Captain said. “It might excite Mr. King if we all descended upon him together. He might think us some of Tsuda’s ogres—the Ogres of Oyeyama.... Sometimes frenzy carries them very far—h’m? There’s a story told of an opium fiend in Java—or perhaps it was hashish, I don’t remember. He ran amuck at Batavia and killed a lot of people in the street before reserves arrived and he was finally run through by a soldier. The strength of fiends in certain stages—h’m?—it’s said to be sometimes enormous. The fellow was run through with a pike, yet such still was the desperation of the man that he—h’m?—he worked himself forward on the pike, and when he got near enough, stabbed the soldier to death with a dagger. Therefore—h’m?” the Captain ended, “I will enter alone. But I will take the lantern from Nipek-kem. Tsuda, will you assure this impressive individual that he may safely trust the lantern in my hand?”
II
At first it was hard to make out much of anything in Mrs. King’s “parlour.” A murk of opium smoke made the gloom tangible. The lamp was not lighted. It had a crazy newspaper shade now, and the chimney was streaked black. The table on which it stood was cluttered with rubbish and clumsily opened tins which had held meats and fish. The whole place was foul, and the air was so thick it could only be breathed with the greatest difficulty by lungs not inoculated.