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Page 129
Clearly my uncle had not left the place; he had been at work all
day in the boathouse. The journey was to account to me for his
disappearance. I had passed the lie along to the queer sentinel
that sat watching in the heather and I wondered whether I had
sent a friend or an enemy into Oban on an empty mission, and
whether I had fouled or forwarded my uncle's enterprise.
I put out the candle and sat down by the window to keep watch,
for the boathouse, the loch and the open sea were under the sweep
of it. But, alas, Nature overreaches our resolves when we are
young. It was far into the night when I awoke.
A wind was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window
that aroused me. There was no moon, but under the open stars the
world was filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below
the window was blurred a little like an impalpable picture.
A low-masted sailing ship lay in the open sea; there was a boat
at the edge of the loch, and human figures were coming out of the
boathouse with burdens which they were loading into the boat.
Almost immediately the boat, manned with rowers, turned about and
silently traversed the crook of the loch on its way to the ship.
But certain of the human figures remained. They continued
between the boathouse and the beach.
And I realized that I had opened my eyes on the loading of a
ship. The boat was taking off a cargo.
Something stored in the boathouse was being transferred to the
hold of the sailing ship. The scene was inconceivably unreal.
There was no sound but the intermittent puffs of the wind, and
the figures were like phantoms in a sort of lighted mist.
Directly as I looked two figures came out of the boathouse and
along the path to the drawing-room door under my window. I took
off my shoes and crept carefully out of the room and down the
stairway. The door from the hall into the long, low room was
ajar. I stood behind it, and looked in through the crack.
My uncle was burning letters and papers in the fireplace with a
candle, and in the chair beyond him sat the strangest human
creature that I had ever seen in the world.
He was a big Oriental with a sodden, brutal face fixed as by some
sorcery into an expression of eternal calm. He wore the uniform
of an English skipper. It was dirty and sea-stained as though
picked up at some sailor's auction. He was speaking to my uncle
and his careful precise sentences in the English tongue, coming
from the creature, seemed thereby to take on added menace.
"Is it wise, Sahib," he said, "to leave any man behind us in this
house?"
"We can do nothing else," replied my uncle.
The Oriental continued with the same carefully selected words:
"Easily we can do something else, Sahib," he said, "with a bar of
pig securely lashed to the ankles, the sea would receive them."
"No, no," replied my uncle, busy with his letters and the candle.
The big Oriental did not move.
"Reflect, Sahib," he went on. "We are entering an immense peril.
The thing that will be hunting us has innumerable agencies
everywhere in its service. If it shall discover that we have
falsified its symbols, it will search the earth for us. And what
are we, Sahib, against this thing? It does not die, nor wax old,
nor grow weary."
"The lad knows nothing," replied my uncle, "and old Andrew will
keep silent."
"Without trouble, Sahib," the creature continued, "I can put the
young one beyond all knowledge and the old one beyond all speech.
Is it permitted?"
My uncle got up from the fireplace, for he had finished with his
work.
"No," he said, "let there be an end of it."
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