Something hurt his hand like a needle. He moved it, felt the thing squirm under his fingers and pierce his palm again and again. With a shriek, he tore the bedclothes from the bed.
A little yellow snake lay coiled there.
He got as far as the telephone, but could not use it. And there he fell heavily, shaking the room and dragging the instrument down with him.
There was some excitement. Cleves and Selden in their bathrobes went in to look at the body. The hotel physician diagnosed it as heart-trouble. Or, possibly, poison. Some gazed significantly at the naked knife still clutched in the dead man’s hands.
Around the wrist of the other hand was twisted a pliable gold bracelet representing a little snake. It had real emeralds for eyes.
It had not been there when Gutchlug died.
But nobody except Sanang could know that. And later when Sanang came back and found Gutchlug very dead on the bed and a policeman sitting outside, he offered no information concerning the new bracelet shaped like a snake with real emeralds for eyes, which adorned the dead man’s left wrist.
Toward evening, however, after an autopsy had confirmed the house physician’s diagnosis that heart-disease had finished Gutchlug, Sanang mustered enough courage to go to the desk in the lobby and send up his card to Miss Norne.