“I suppose that old Buddhist is somewhere about,” thought the young lieutenant. “I’ll venture to say he’s none too good to run me through with a sword, if he gets the chance.”
He began to speculate upon how to move, feeling that he could not remain in the narrow entry forever, when a faint sound reached his ears, as of somebody approaching in bare feet. He immediately raised his pistol, and tried harder than ever to pierce the gloom which confronted him. But the darkness was absolute, for the windows of the house of worship had been boarded up just before the fall of the city.
The footsteps came closer and closer, until Gilbert judged that the on-comer was less than ten feet away. Then he heard the faint swish of a robe, as it brushed one end of the table upon which the meal to the dead was spread.
“Stop, or I’ll fire!” cried Gilbert, in a determined voice. Instantly the sounds ceased directly in front of him. But from a distance came a low voice, asking some question in Chinese. What this was, Gilbert did not know; nor did he hear any answer to it.
The young lieutenant felt that he was now face to face with a deadly enemy, and it must be confessed that the cold perspiration stood out on his forehead. It is one thing to face an enemy in the open: it is quite another to face the same enemy in the dark. Gilbert had heard of bad Western men sometimes fighting a duel to the death with knives in a pitch-dark room, and he felt now that he wanted nothing to do with anything so terrible.
Suddenly he heard a slight noise close to his left side. He was about to turn in the direction, when several grains of rice fell upon his extended hand.
He did not know what to make of this. Had the rice been thrown by some one? and, if so, for what purpose? He knew that to touch the food of the dead is considered by many Chinamen a bad thing to do.
Soon, however, he concluded that the rice had been thrown merely to detract his attention from the person in front of him. The sounds from those bare feet reached him again, but now they were going away instead of approaching.
The enemy was perhaps calculating to attack him in another way, and he could not help but wonder what the next movement would be. Bitterly he regretted having come to the spot without a companion or two. “If I am killed in here, nobody will ever know what became of me,” he reasoned, soberly.
His nerves were at the topmost tension, and his ears strained as never before. Consequently, when there came a faint noise from under the table before him, he noted it at once, although it was so slight that an ordinary ear would never have detected it.