She soon fell asleep after peace was restored, but I lay awake for hours watching the tracery of palm shadows on the wall opposite, thrown there by the light of the square. At midnight the lamp was put out, the room grew black, without a ray of light, and after a time I, too, fell asleep.
I was awakened by a curious sense of a presence in the room. My eyelids flew open, my ears strained. The room was one solid block of blackness, there was no ray of light anywhere. I could see and hear nothing for a moment, though I was certain another living thing had entered the room. Then at the same instant there was a violent vibration of the bed beneath me and a piercing scream from Suzee, a blind, wild cry to me for protection.
Instinctively I threw my arms out to her. Her body was struggling, writhing. I felt it as my hands shot out and gripped fiercely, in the thick darkness, round two hard hairy arms, tense, rigid, as they held her down.
Suzee's voice broke out suddenly as my grip possibly loosened the pressure of those other hands upon her throat, and she was speaking in Chinese. A hot breath came on my eyes, some face must have been close to mine in the blackness; under my arms, on Suzee's wildly heaving body, I felt something moving, warm and slow and soft, and knew that it was blood.
"Suzee," I called to her across her clamour of terrified entreaty, "get a light if you can."
The hot breath came nearer.
"Devil! Devil! This is your promise, your English word." The sound came to me like the hiss of steam close to my ear, but I knew the voice of Hop Lee—Hop Lee buried in Sitka, thousands of miles away.
The arms in my clutch struggled furiously; in their spasm of muscular effort they tore me upwards from the bed, as the lock of my fingers would not give way.
Suzee's voice clamoured in passionate entreaty, unintelligible to me. Then suddenly came a terrific twist, which wrenched away one of the arms, and a lightning stab, a deep burning in my shoulder, and simultaneously a blaze of light. Over me hung the bent old form of Hop Lee, his right arm, lifted up, held a long knife raised for its second stab. His face was alight with fury. Scarlet was already running in bright ribands over the whiteness of the bed, Suzee's blood and my own. I threw up my left arm and caught his wrist and turned the hand and knife upwards till it pointed to the ceiling, my own arm stretched to the fullest length upright. Suzee gave one horrible cry of terror, animal terror, and then there was silence beside me.
"She has fainted, has fainted," my brain muttered in itself. A sickening fear came into it as silence fell after that one awful cry.