There was another interval of silence.
When I could trust myself to look back at him he was out of his bed, standing erect at the side of it. The pupils of his eyes were now contracted; his eyeballs gleamed in the light of the candle as he moved his head slowly to and fro. He was thinking; he was doubting; he spoke again.
"How do I know?" he said. "The Indians may be hidden in the house."
He stopped, and walked slowly to the other end of the room. He turned,—waited,—came back to the bed.
"It's not even locked up," he went on. "It's in the drawer of her cabinet. And the drawer doesn't lock."
He sat down on the side of the bed. "Anybody might take it," he said.
He rose again restlessly, and reiterated his first words. "How do I know? The Indians may be hidden in the house."
He waited again. I drew back behind the half-curtain of the bed. He looked about the room, with the vacant glitter in his eyes. It was a breathless moment. There was a pause of some sort. A pause in the action of the opium? a pause in the action of the brain? Who could tell? Everything depended now on what he did next.
He laid himself down again on the bed!
A horrible doubt crossed my mind. Was it possible that the sedative action of the opium was making itself felt already? It was not in my experience that it should do this. But what is experience where opium is concerned? There are probably no two men in existence on whom the drug acts in exactly the same manner. Was some constitutional peculiarity in him feeling the influence in some new way? Were we to fail, on the very brink of success?