The sailor hardly knew whether to be amused or annoyed at the tone adopted by the chiromantist. He continued to balance the matter in a confused sort of way, after he had taken shy leave of Lisalda. Arrived in his room, he barred and bolted the outer door with a thoroughness born of much adventuring. He loosened a hanger that he wore at his side, and tied it by its belt as with a sword knot to his wrist. That had been the toilet de rigueur for the night among his former messmates, the pirates of the Antilles. In this array then, supine upon the bed, he confidently awaited developments. To keep himself awake he continued to agitate the mysterious character and conduct of Aquelarre. The events of the evening, since the ill-assorted three had left their ship together, all forced themselves into the question. This opened the road to a review of the whole voyage and the change it had wrought in his life. And that life—what turn would it take on the morrow? What result from the heart-probing of Lisalda? The singularity was that the more plausible he painted the future, the darker shaded the present, and the past, of his sweetheart. He felt it was an insult to her to question her about that past of which she had denied the recital. And yet he longed—and how he longed—to rise to her from his very bed to question her. And her relations with the cabalist—how long before the voyage she had served him Ataurresagasti never knew, but apart from that it was gall and wormwood to him that she should even have shared his state room at sea. The fancy forced itself upon the sailor that the cabalist—who saw through all things—had seen through her disguise. The more he turned over the reasons assigned by Lisalda for the cabalist never sleeping alone, the more unlikely it appeared that a prince of all the Magi, and tamer of the Demon of the Ring, should show a side so puny. In spite of his better self there forced itself upon him another, and quite opposite, picture of the nights that these two had passed together. Yet why (and here for a moment he threw off that thraldom) yet why had Lisalda, this particular evening, apparently willingly exchanged with him the place, which by that hateful theory she should have found a pleasance. Again wider issues loomed in every direction, until he returned again bewildered to what seemed willy-nilly his keynote for that night. He tossed from side to side. Picture after picture stood out before his mind's eye, until he even reached the length of fancying Lisalda at that moment on the other side with the cabalist, while Ataurresagasti on his side lay befooled. That she could not have got there by any human means was a difficulty which did not even occur to him for solution. The sweat stood out thick upon his brow. He positively saw Lisalda twined about the body of his rival. His hair (he felt it) was turning grey. He saw the cabalist (a wonder of satiety) remove that ring of rings from his finger and fit it jestingly upon hers. At this precise juncture of his nightmare, Ataurresagasti suddenly started broad awake to his feet. Dream or no dream—whatever the rest of the night had been—there was certainly now something awful in progress in the adjoining apartment. Something (which he instinctively felt was not human) was struggling for life and death with the luckless cabalist. The hair of the sailor stood on end. There was no mistake about it this time. Time had been when he fancied he felt fear, but he knew now that only at this moment had he learnt its kind. All at once a most terrible shriek rang out through every corner of the house. Ataurresagasti dashed the partition into splinters with a blow that would have shattered steel. He leaped into the room just in time to arrest the escape of some huge incredible beast, that stood sullenly at bay, in the strangling streak of dawn. The mystery was solved. Down came the hanger with an impulse so irresistible that it sheared off a whole limb of the accursed one. The point of the hanger actually penetrated so deeply into the flooring that it was a moment of anxiety (during which his quarry, although maimed, might have bested him) before Ataurresagasti succeeded in getting it out again. But when he had recovered it, the animal had disappeared, impossible to find out how or where. This alone he saw in the imperfect light (or rather in the imperfect darkness) that the whole room was scattered from end to end with blood and bones and brain, which was all that was left of that most unhappy man.
A sickness came upon the victor. He mopped his dripping forehead. He turned to leave the presence-chamber of death and doom; he picked up as he did so the severed limb, a casual glance at which confirmed his general impression that the gaunt game had been but a particularly large and loathly wolf, such as occasionally penetrated the precincts of towns in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees. Ataurresagasti walked down straight into the reception room of the night before. For the moment the possible alarm of Lisalda at that terrible shriek of dissolution of the cabalist had not even entered his mind. His object was to summon Aquelarre. To his surprise he found him crouching there already white as a ghost apparently with fear. He sprang to his feet at sight of the sailor, and barely suppressed a cry. This time it was the sailor that read, and the landlord's face that provided reading matter. Amazement was writ legibly in every line of it, and his eyes were opened to the size of saucers. And Ataurresagasti asked himself, without finding answer, what connexion all this had with the attempt to drug him, which he had discovered the preceding evening. The two men stared at one another for some minutes without finding speech, of which indeed the innkeeper, at any rate, seemed incapable. The word when taken up was taken up by Ataurresagasti.
"My pharmaceutical friend seems somewhat upset by my early appearance after draining the drowsy cup which he compounded for me overnight."
"And it is not natural that a landlord should be fearful for his slate when he sees an uncancelled score slinking downstairs to the outlet at such unearthly hour?"
"Alas, for your slate (if that touch you so nearly) a fiscal fleeter than yourself has attended here this night, and collected your other lodger's scot."
"What means this matin pleasantry? How goes it with the cabalist?"
"Well, I hope, although I dare not think it well. His reckoning, I fear, will overreach him."
"Is he dead?"
"As much of him as can still be traced is unquestionably dead."
"That then undid my beauty sleep. I thought I dreamed an unforgetful shriek."