"Go to the devil!" I answered, but I knew Slade would go to my room, instead, and nail those white-laundered collars I had kept clean.
That night, when I turned in, I found that, indeed, Slade had been below, and had rummaged my things about most unkindly, taking my linen. I turned in with a feeling of resentment at his luck in position, but I dismissed the feeling quickly as the absurdity of the affair dawned upon me, for, after all, I was not thinking of women at all, and had no right to under the present high salary I was drawing.
Rolling into my bunk, I was instantly asleep. In my dreams I saw that walrus-looking Chink. His long black feelers hung down over me, the points piercing my vitals like tusks. I gave a yell and awoke!
The lamp was burning dimly, as it always did in my room at night, ready for the sudden call to the deck, and I could see everything distinctly the moment I opened my eyes. A face was just leaving the glass of my window. I sprang out of the bunk, and peered out through the glass. At that instant there was a heavy rat-tat-tat upon the door, and the voice of Jim Douglas, of Slade's watch, called to me that it was eight bells, and time to turn out. I threw open the door.
"Did you look in through my window?" I asked him.
"No, sir; I wouldn't do anything like that, sir," said the seaman.
He was a good-looking young Scotchman of twenty-four, tall and strong, with an honest face. I knew he was telling the truth.
"That's all," I said, and he went on his way.
I looked at the gun that hung over my shelf at the bunk head. It was one I took off a dago named Louis, of my watch, and it was a heavy gun, forty-five caliber, and long in the barrel.
"Perfectly absurd to think of it," I muttered to myself. I pulled on my coat, and started for the deck, when something, some instinct, told me to take the weapon.