I stood up upon that slippery deck and pulled out my magazine pistol. I looked round. There was nothing whatever to be seen but the softly falling snow. I tried a low whistle to the people on the bank, but there was no answer.
It is a good thing to be under discipline. I had my orders, I waited, listened, and heard nothing. Then I crept aft to where a big glass-roofed cabin had been built out on the deck. There was no light shining through the roof. The door was locked. I listened and there was no sound save the soft, falling noise of the snowflakes.
It was forrard, then, that I must go; and, treading with the greatest caution, I crept towards the bows of the old ship. The fo'c'sle hatchway loomed up before me. With cold, tingling fingers I felt for the door. It opened in the middle, in the usual way, and the hinges swung back as if they had been well oiled. Before me was the companion ladder—a dark well. With my pistol in my hand, I went down the stairs as noiselessly as a cat. I had only got to the bottom when a warm, stuffy smell came to my nostrils. I was in a triangular space roofed by heavy bulkheads. It was not quite dark, for a long rod of yellow light came from behind the stairs, where there was a door. I went up to it and listened. Everything was perfectly silent.
Then I pushed open the door and entered. What I expected to see, I cannot say, but I was prepared for almost anything. What I did see was entirely unexpected.
I found myself in a long saloon lit by a swivel lamp hanging from the roof. Dark crimson curtains were drawn over windows and possible portholes. The floor was covered with a faded Turkey carpet. Here and there a mirror was let into the wall. I saw a case of books and an excellent photogravure of the King, over a little grate in which glowed a fire of smouldering coke. There were two or three basket armchairs padded in cretonne. There was a central table, two little smoking-tables, and a sort of buffet at the side of a further door. Upon the buffet were glasses, syphons, and various bottles. There was a box of cigars upon the central table and a silver cigarette-box upon one of the smaller ones. I had come into a little, luxuriously furnished club-room, which struck upon the senses with an irresistibly homely and pleasant note as I looked round in wild amazement. There was even a brass kettle on a trivet by the fire, which was singing melodiously to itself. I stared round the place like a child, and caught sight of my face with open eyes and dropping jaws in one of the looking-glasses. What was I doing here? What had I tumbled into? What?...
I came back to myself just in time. There was a loud and sudden creak, the yawn of a partly open door. Then—Bang!
The gilt-framed mirror in which I had been gazing at myself smashed in the centre and starred all round, as something whizzed past my head with a ricochet.
Instinctively I crouched down upon the carpet, wheeling round as I did so.
The door at the opposite end of the saloon had been slid back. In the rather dim light from the hanging lamp, I saw a great, bearded, whiskered face, red, and framed in a fury of lint-coloured hair. It seemed just like a gorilla turned white and malevolent in a sudden ray of sunshine.
There was another deafening explosion: One! Two! Three! and the furious noise in the confined space of the cabin filled me with something of its own rage. I saw red. The warm and evil silence of this comfortable place had frightened me far more than this onslaught. Unharmed, I leapt to my feet.