His little West Indian stewardess also reported the gossip from her friend on another corridor, which was, in effect, that Miss White, the trained nurse, took all 226 meals in her room and had not been observed to leave that somewhat monotonous sanctuary.
How many more of the band there might be Neeland did not know. He remembered vaguely, while lying rigid under the grip of the drug, that he had heard Ilse Dumont’s voice mention somebody called Karl. And he had an idea that this Karl might easily be the big, ham-fisted German who had tried so earnestly to stifle him and throw him from the vestibule of the midnight express.
However, it did not matter now. The box was safe in the captain’s care; the Volhynia would be lying at anchor off Liverpool before daylight; the whole exciting and romantic business was ended.
With an unconscious sigh, not entirely of relief, Neeland opened his cigarette case, found it empty, turned and went slowly below with the idea of refilling it.
They were dancing somewhere on deck; the music of the ship’s orchestra came to his ears. He paused a moment on the next deck to lean on the rail in the darkness and listen.
Far beneath him, through a sea as black as onyx, swept the reflections of the lighted ports; and he could hear the faint hiss of foam from the curling flow below.
As he turned to resume his quest for cigarettes, he was startled to see directly in front of him the heavy figure of a man—so close to him, in fact, that Neeland instinctively threw up his arm, elbow out, to avoid contact.
But the man, halting, merely lifted his hat, saying that in the dim light he had mistaken Neeland for a friend; and they passed each other on the almost 227 deserted deck, saluting formally in the European fashion, with lifted hats.
His spirits a trifle subdued, but still tingling with the shock of discovering a stranger so close behind him where he had stood leaning over the ship’s rail, Neeland continued on his way below.
Probably the big man had made a mistake in good faith; but the man certainly had approached very silently; was almost at his very elbow when discovered. And Neeland remembered the light-shot depths over which, at that moment, he had been leaning; and he realised that it would have been very easy for a man as big as that to have flung him overboard before he had wit to realise what had been done to him.