There was a footstep on the deck. Dr. Custrin stood behind us. Between his fingers a cigarette sent up a little spiral of blue smoke; across his arm he carried a shining silver wrap.
"Sir Alexander asked me to tell you to put this round your shoulders," he said to Marjorie and unfolded the silver scarf. "The wind is freshening."
The girl drew the wrap about her shoulders. The doctor looked at the two of us.
"What a wonderful night!" he remarked. "In these latitudes the moon seems to exercise a strange influence upon us. For example, your father has been telling me the whole story of his early life, Miss Garth, and I believe I have been unbosoming my aspirations and ambitions to him. But confidences under the moon one is apt to regret in the morning, eh, major?"
He spoke perfectly suavely and with no trace of impertinence in his manner. But there was a hint of double meaning in his words (which clearly indicated that he had overheard at any rate the end of our conversation) that jarred on me.
"You need have no fears about Major Okewood," replied Marjorie with just the faintest touch of scorn in her voice. "I am sure he is the pattern of discretion. I think," she added, "I am feeling the tiniest bit chilly. You promised to play for me, doctor. Won't you come into the saloon? There is a piano there!"
Her gaze travelled proudly past me as she turned to Custrin. She made it as clear as was compatible with the laws of hospitality that her invitation did not include me. It was her woman's way of getting her own back. I loved her for it; but I took a violent dislike to Custrin.
I mumbled some excuse about having to go to the chart-room and they left me. Presently from the saloon came the rhythmic strains of the Rosen-Kavalier, most sensual, most entrancing, of all Strauss's music, played with a master-hand. The Liebestod, Grieg, Massenet's Air des Larmes, Schumann—Custrin ran from one to the other while the Naomi stolidly thumped her way through the hissing sea. And always, curse his impudence! the fellow played love-music....
One by one members of the crew drifted to the head of the companion-way until there was quite a company of them outlined against the yellow light that shone up from the cosy saloon. I remained leaning against the rail, my chin on my chest, my pipe in my mouth, and let my thoughts drift.... Adams coughing over his pannikin, John Bard, his honest face troubled, looking round that house of death, the yellow-faced Vice-Consul pulling on his black cigar.
But always I found my mind harking back to that ungainly silhouette framed in the doorway of the hut and to the sinister echo of his footsteps in the yard as the stranger turned his back on the scene of slaughter which, I doubted not, had been of his contriving. What had the Vice-Consul said? "His power is tremendous, his vengeance swift and terrible!" Who was this lame man whom nobody saw yet whom everybody feared? There was something of the insistence of a nightmare in the way in which the glimpse I had had of him hung in my thoughts, confounding itself with the ineffaceable image of that club-footed man whom I had seen fall lifeless—how many years ago it seemed now!—before my brother's smoking automatic. Well, whoever El Cojo was, Mexican or South American, I was out of his clutches now. The rail of the Naomi, quivering beneath my hand to the leap of the seas, gave me confidence. I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and went below.