She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves, and coming toward him.
“I—I once killed a man,” she said with a catch in her breath.
Cleves reddened with astonishment. “Why did you do that?” he asked.
“He was already on his way to kill me in bed.”
“You were perfectly right,” remarked Recklow coolly.
“I don’t know ... I was in bed.... And then, on the edge of sleep, I felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.”
All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and watched her intently.
“I—I had only a moment’s mental freedom,” she went on in a ghost of a voice. “I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray.... And then, O God! I saw him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a shroud.... And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine, white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey deathward—then—then I became frightened.... And I killed him—I slew him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!”
Selden moistened his lips: “That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,” he said. “I was there at the time.”
“He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,” whispered the girl.