"Pardon me, Mr. Prale, but there is something sticking on the end of your suit case," she said.
Prale glanced down. On one end of the suit case was a bit of paper. It had been stuck there by a drop of mucilage, and the mucilage was still wet.
He thanked Kate Gilbert and picked the paper off, but he did not throw it over the rail into the water. He crumpled it in his hand and, when he was some distance away, he smoothed it out.
There was a single word written on it, in the same handwriting as that of the note he had found pinned to the pillow in the stateroom—"Retribution."
Sidney Prale glanced around quickly. Nobody seemed to be paying particular attention to him. Kate Gilbert and her maid had passed him and were preparing to land. Prale put the piece of paper into his coat pocket and picked up his suit case again. That bit of paper, he knew well, had not been on the suit case when he had left the stateroom. It had been put there as he had made his way through the crowd of passengers along the rail. Who could have stuck it there—and why?
Now the passengers were streaming ashore, and Sidney Prale stepped to one side and watched them. Perhaps he had some business enemy on board, he told himself, some man he had not noticed, and who was trying to frighten him after a childish fashion. He searched the faces of the landing passengers, but saw nobody he had known in Central America, nobody who looked at all suspicious.
"Either a joke—or a mistake," Prale told himself again.
He started ashore. He saw Kate Gilbert just ahead of him, the bulky maid at her heels. An elderly man met her, but did not greet her as a father would have been expected to do. Prale saw them hold a whispered conversation, and it seemed to him that the elderly man gave him a searching glance.
"I must look like a swindler!" Prale mused.
Finally, as he went out upon the street to engage a taxicab and start for a hotel, he saw Kate Gilbert and her maid and the elderly man again, getting into a limousine. The girl held a piece of paper in her hand, and was reading something from it to the elderly man. As she got into the car, she dropped the piece of paper to the curb.