"Went straight to Honduras and stayed there for ten years, eh?" Rufus Shepley said to himself. "Um! Looks bad! I never put much stock in those Honduras chaps—but this one seems to be all right. Never can tell, though!"
Sidney Prale, still smiling, and humming a Spanish love song, reached his stateroom and threw open the door; and just inside, he came to a stop, astonished.
Somebody had been in that stateroom and had been going through his things. The contents of his suit case were spilled on the floor. A bag was wide open; he had left it closed and in a corner less than an hour before.
Prale went down on his knees and made a quick inspection. There did not seem to be anything missing. A package of papers—business documents for the greater part—had been examined, he could tell at a glance, but none had been taken.
"Peculiar!" Prale told himself. "Some sneak thief, I suppose. No sense in complaining to the ship's officers at this late hour, especially since nothing has been stolen. Makes a man angry, though!"
He put the suit case on the table and began repacking the things that had been scattered on the floor. Then he gathered up his toilet articles, bits of clothing he had left out until the last minute, a few souvenirs of Honduras he had been showing a tourist the evening before. He turned toward the berth to pick up his light overcoat.
There was a sheet of paper pinned to the pillow, paper that might have been taken from an ordinary writing tablet. Sidney Prale took it up and glanced at it. A few words of handwriting were upon the paper, words that looked as if they had been scrawled hurriedly with a pencil that needed sharpening badly.
"Retribution is inevitable and comes when you least expect it."
The smile fled from Sidney Prale's lips, and the Spanish love song he had been humming died in his throat. He frowned, and read the message again.
"Now what the deuce does this mean?" he gasped.