“The knife! The three-bladed knife! If only—”
With one more tremendous push she set the yellow man into a spin that landed him with a splash into the water of the lagoon.
“He swims well enough,” she assured herself.
Then, with heart thumping wildly, she snatched up the much coveted knife with the jeweled hilt and went sprinting away up the slope, away to the south and across the bridge over the lagoon, to lose herself at last in a throng that had gathered about a wandering Egyptian street fakir.
“Have I lost him?” she whispered.
The answer, though she could not know it now, was “Yes, but not for long.”
CHAPTER XXV
ONCE AGAIN THE ORGAN PLAYS AT MIDNIGHT
“I promised to wait for Jeanne on Byrd’s Polar Ship,” she recalled. “I’ll go there now. Peter Nordsen, the watchman, will be there. People will be passing through. It will be safe enough now.” She had hidden the three-bladed knife beneath her blouse. For all this, she did not feel quite easy about it.
To her surprise, when she arrived at the spot where the ship had been moored she found it gone.
“Gone!” she exclaimed in surprise.