linger; there was a hurried cocktail, and we were gone. I remember that I was last but one in the procession down the stairs from this top floor; Brodie, who had held the door open for us to pass, came last. Also I remembered later, that as we reached the next flight, he said he had forgotten something, and dashed upstairs again to fetch it. A moment later he rejoined us in the street, and we all went on to dinner. "It was a kind of house-warming party," he explained.
The evening passed pleasantly. We went on to Koster and Biel's music hall, and after that, to supper in some Tenderloin joint or other. And it was here I first noticed a change in our host. Something about him was different. His behavour [**typo?] was not what was normal to him. His face was pale, his manner nervous and excited; though there was no drink in him to account for it, he was overwrought, unusually voluble, unable to keep still for a single moment. I had never seen him like this before, and the strangeness of his behaviour arrested me. Once or twice, à propos of nothing, he referred to the money he had spent on his apartment; and more than once in asides to me, he spoke of the value of his rugs and curtains, engaging my endorsement, as it were. The other men, who knew him less intimately, probably noticed nothing, or, if they did, attributed it to the excitement of alcohol.... But it made me more and more uneasy. I didn't like it; I watched him attentively. I came to the strange conclusion, long before the evening was over, that he was frightened. And when he met suggestions that it was time for bed with obstinate refusals, anxious and nervous at the same time, I knew that he was more than frightened, he was terrified.
Once when I asked him whether he felt unwell, there was startled terror in his cunning eyes as he whispered: "I dreamed of rats last night. Something bad will be coming." His face was white as chalk. To dream of rats, with him, always meant an enemy in the offing; a dozen times he had given me instances of this strange superstition;
to dream of an acquaintance in connexion with these
