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Page 41
"What of it?" Falconer looked stubborn. "I daresay the fellow
received his deserts.... But the case hardly applies--what?"
"Well--it makes one feel that anything can happen here--that the
city is quicksand where a chance step would engulf one." Billy
stared frowningly out on the vivid street ahead of him. A pretty
English bride and her soldier husband were out exercising their
dogs. Two ladies in a victoria were advertising their toilettes. A
blond baby toddled past with his black nurse. It was all very
peaceful and charming. It did not look like quicksand.... Into the
picture came a one-eyed man with a stuffed crocodile on his head,
stalking slowly along, scanning the veranda with his single,
penetrating eye, calling his wares in harsh gutturals, and with him
came suddenly the sense of that strange background before which all
this bright tourist life was played, that dark watching, secret
East, curious and incalculable.
Falconer folded his paper with a sharp crackle that recalled young
Hill's wandering thought. "That's all very well, but it doesn't
apply," he observed, with conviction.
"Then where is she?" Billy was bluntly belligerent.
The other put his paper in his pocket. "In Alexandria, to be sure,
and not at all pleased, either, to have you bring her name into such
questioning." He looked squarely at Billy as he said that, and the
eyes of the two young man met and exchanged a secret challenge of
hostility.
Billy rose. "Oh, all right," he returned. "I daresay I am as much a
fool as you take me for.... She may be all right. But if not--I
thought I'd give you a chance to take a hand in it."
"The sporting chance," said Falconer, with an appreciable smile.
"I'm much obliged--but I don't at all share your misgivings.... And
what in the world do you propose to do about it?"
For a minute Billy's gaze blankly interrogated the sunlit distances.
His eyes were fixed, but empty; his forehead knitted in an uncertain
frown. Then quite suddenly he turned and flashed at Falconer a look
of odd and unforeseen decision.
"I'm going to buy a crocodile," he imparted, with a wide, boyish
grin. "I'm going to buy a crocodile of a one-eyed man."
Stolidly Falconer eyed his departing back. Stolidly, definitely,
comprehensively, he pronounced judgment. "Mad," said he. "Mad as the
March Hare."
CHAPTER VIII
THE MIDNIGHT VISITOR
That stealthy touch brought Arlee half upright, shot with ghastly
alarms. Her heart stopped beating; it stood still in the cold clutch
of terror. The breath seemed to have left her body.
Once more she felt the hands gropingly upon her. It came from the
back side of her bed, reaching apparently from the very wall. And
then she heard a voice whispering, "Be still--I do not hurt you. Be
still."
It was a woman's voice, soft, sibilant, hushed, and the frozen grip
of fear was broken. She was trembling now uncontrollably.
"Who is there?"
"S-sh!" came the warning response, and then, her eyes staring into
the shadowy recess, she saw the curtains at the back side of the bed
were parting as a figure appeared between them.
"Give me a box, a book--somethings to put here in this lock,"
commanded the voice peremptorily, and in a daze Arlee found herself
extending a magazine across the bed toward the half-seen figure, who
turned and busied herself about the curtains a moment, then came
straight across the bed into the room beside Arlee.
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