CHAPTER XI
A HERO'S HOMECOMING
It was two o'clock when I began powdering and screening the yellow-hued inner lining of my sea shells. Subconsciously, I must have set three in my mind as the time my caller would come, for it was not until that hour that I ceased my absorbingly interesting labours and looked at my watch. So far as I can recall, I felt no concern one way or the other. I simply noted that the hour had gone by without bringing my expected visitor, and went back to my work.
As a matter of fact, having just made a most gratifying discovery, I was rather glad that the interruption had not come. I had isolated a new and wonderful colour—a dark coppery gold that I had yearned for every time I saw sunlight filtering through brine onto the gently undulating leaves of reef-rooted kelp. Now I had it; and it was not an accident—I could do it again. By standing on edge a fragment of one of the big bivalves I was experimenting with, I discovered that a sharp blow with the side of my pestle caused the thinnest of chips to fly from its enamel-like lining. These, glassily translucent as they fell, when reduced in the mortar gave a warm, almost glowing powder of exactly the hue I sought. Now if I could only devise a way of mixing it effectively....
So well were my innermost faculties set to respond to that expected knock, that, when it came, not even the mazes of exultant speculation in which my discovery had set my brain—my outward wits—to wandering, prevented instant ganglionic reaction. I didn't have to think. That had all been done an hour before, and the necessary orders given. At the alarm, these had only to be carried out as prearranged. My legs and arms simply obeyed the directions that had been registered for them in some convenient little nerve-knots strung along my spinal column. That carried me, stepping softly, out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, and past the middle of the sitting-room, well beyond the direct line of vision of anyone opening the door from the hall. It was a position from which I must see anyone coming in before he was able to locate me. The rest of the order—carried out simultaneously—had to do with laying the pestle lightly on the bathroom table and thrusting the hand that had been wielding it deep into the right-hand pocket of my old shooting jacket.
In the second or two that it had taken me to reach the middle of the sitting-room from the bathroom, my wits had relinquished their rainbow dreams and were back on their workaday job. They it was which, now the limit of ganglionic action had been reached, stepped in and took command. It was not from nervousness that I swallowed once and flashed my tongue across my lips before speaking. I only wanted to be sure my voice was as firm as I knew the resolution directing it to be. Speaking sharply, but in a tone not above the ordinary, I said: "Come in, Allen!"
Among the several little surprises in store for me in the course of the next few minutes, not the least came when the man on the other side of the door coughed and cleared his throat as his hand began to turn the knob. I was just telling myself that such palpable symptoms of nervousness were very unlike "Slant" Allen to display, when the door swung inwards and "Slant" Allen stepped into the room. Allen, but not the Allen I had known. Absolutely nerved to readiness as I was, the contrast of this flushed, slightly embarrassed, almost diffident young chap and the ruthless, cold-blooded badman I had made every preparation—physical and mental—to meet came nigh to taking me aback. It was like clambering up out of a companionway, all set for a hurricane sweeping the deck—and finding it calm. For an instant my jaw must have come near to sagging in the amazement that swept over me. I pulled myself together quickly, though, and if Allen noticed my momentary lapse, he gave no sign of it.
He was the first to speak. "So you were expecting me?" he said, but not as though greatly surprised.
"Ra-ther," I replied with emphasis. "Look at this!" and I pulled out the revolver from my right-hand pocket, released the hair-trigger adjustment, slid the safety-catch, and laid it on the table by the window. I would not have been guilty of such an obvious act of bravado had not my preternaturally acute senses told me that, so far as Allen was concerned at least, there was not going to be any occasion to use the weapon. That feeling persisted even when, as Allen turned slightly in the act of closing the door, I noticed a very perceptible bulge where the flimsy corner of his pongee coat swept his lean right flank. The instant he entered the room I knew that, whatever motives had brought him there, the intention of trying to kill me was not among them. Scarcely less strong were my doubts that I would be able to establish any valid grounds for killing him. My old sneaking liking for certain things about the debonair rascal was not dead.