The Vandalia was bearing into a thin mist. The night was cool, quiet. Had he been on deck Peter would have seen the last lights of Osezaki engulfed as if at the dropping of a curtain.
During the voyage he had haunted the smoking-room, hoping that by dint of patient listening he might catch an informative word dropped carelessly by one of the players. No such luck. The players were out-of-season tourists, bound for South China or India, or salesmen, patiently immersed in the long and strenuous task of killing time.
"——thirty—thirty-five—forty—forty-five——" The fat man was counting his losings.
Faint, padded footsteps passed the port doorway. Peter became aware of an elusive perfume—scented rice powder——
"——seventy-five—eighty—eighty-five—ninety——"
A pale, malignant face was framed momentarily in one of the starboard windows.
Peter blinked, then bounded after. The salesman impeded his progress and grudgingly gave way.
The deck was empty, slippery with the wet of the mist. He was suddenly aware that one of the ports, in the neighborhood of the stateroom he had entered, was ajar. Nervously he halted, gasping as a long, trembling hand, at the extremity of a spectral wrist, plucked at his sleeve. Blanched as an arm of the adolescent moon, it fumbled weakly at his clutching fingers—and was swiftly withdrawn!
The staring eyes of a white, gibbous face sank back from the hole. Below the nose the face seemed not to exist.
Its horror wrapped an icy cord about his heart. He plunged his arm to the shoulder through the round opening, struck a yielding, warm body; descending claws steeled about his wrist and deliberately forced him back.