“Thank God you got her, Hobson—since she wanted money, it seems. By the way, you were quite right in thinking that I got you here to-night in order to pay you out.”
“Eh? What’s that?”
Hobson’s voice leaped from the darkness, vivid with a horrible fear, pulsating and lingering under the roof weirdly.
Cranshaw spoke after a moment; his words were cold and sharp and quite impersonal.
“Hobson, you were a fool to imagine that I would ever forget or forgive. You had me snared for your own crime; you broke me; you got the girl I wanted; you became the junior partner in my place. I became John Smith, came to Raratonga, settled here and waited. I knew you would come sooner or later.”
He paused, smiling inscrutably at the darkness.
Hobson was breathing stertorously, and there was another and queerer sound—like a fat man licking his lips in fear. The darkness intensified everything.
“I was in two minds, Hobson. I had a notion to take you out to the reefs for a swim. You don’t know it, but there are interesting things out there in the warm water—bubbly eels, spiny leper-fishes with every spine deadly poison, sting-rays, devil-fish, plenty, plenty snake and shark. But I decided against that, for I knew you had imagination. So I brought you here instead.”
Cranshaw still smiled into the blackness above him, lying motionless as he talked. He had no need to switch on the light to guess at the shaking mosquito curtains of the other bed, the pasty-faced man who clutched at them, the horrible fascination with which Hobson followed his every word.
“Now, my dear fellow,” he went on, his voice acridly smooth, “I want you to take a little look around. Then—”