"Who——?" gasped the man. And then, "You here! 'Cré nom! It's Pete, the waiter!"
Peter started back in astonishment.
"Jim Coast!" he said.
Hawk Kennedy chuckled and scrambled to his feet, halfway between a laugh and a groan.
"Well, I'm damned!"
Peter was still staring at him, the recovered bills loose in his hand. Jim Coast thrust out an arm for them.
"The money," he demanded. "The money, Pete."
Without a word Peter handed it to him. It was none of his. Coast counted the bills, the blood dripping from his fingers and soiling them, but he wiped them off with a dirty handkerchief and put them away into his pocket. Blood money, Peter thought, and rightly named.
"And now, mon gars, if it's all the same to you, I'd like you to take me to some place where we can tie up this hole in my shoulder."
This was like Coast's impudence. He had regained his composure again and, in spite of the pain he was suffering, had become his proper self, the same Jim Coast who had bunked with Peter on the Bermudian, full of smirking assertiveness and sinister suggestion. Peter was too full of astonishment to make any comment, for it was difficult to reconcile the thought of Jim Coast with Hawk Kennedy, and yet there he was, the terror of Black Rock House revealed.