All the baffling, violent emotions that had possessed Drysdale during the last few minutes boiled up suddenly within him, his interlocutor's words of easy command setting a match to his fury. With a swift, uncontrolled movement he hurled the glass he held, striking McCurdie full in the face.
There was a sharp hissing sound as the liquid splashed on the hot tiles of the hearth, and the glass shivered against the mantelpiece a few feet behind McCurdie's head.
"Good God!" Drysdale's voice was a mere thread of sound, as the eyes of the other man continued to look stedfastly into his own. "Who—what are you?"
"I am Jim McCurdie, whom you sent to death eight years ago in the Desert of Tlat."
Drysdale gasped and held on to the back of a chair, while the familiar surroundings of the music room receded to vast distances and a swimming darkness enveloped him. Then, slowly, reason asserted itself. How absurd of him to think, even for a moment, that the glass had passed through McCurdie's head! It was merely an effect of the firelight and his own jangled nerves.
"It appears you did not die—in spite of my efforts," he answered, with a barely perceptible tremor in his voice.
"I was buried by the Well of Tiz, with six spear-wounds through my body."
Drysdale looked stunned for a moment, but a lifelong habit of disbelieving what he did not understand conquered his rising fear.
"Either you're Jim McCurdie or his double! In any case you're making a nuisance of yourself," he said finally, and drawing an automatic from his pocket he leveled it at his companion, who had moved until he stood with his back to the paneled wall at the right of the fireplace. "I am going to shoot you. If you did not die in the desert, you'll die here and now! I shall say I thought you were the ghost that haunts this room!"
"I am the ghost!" replied McCurdie. "I have waited eight years to get back again; and tonight gave me my entrance to the world of humans once more. In this room there is power I could adapt to my needs—power to materialize—to borrow for a brief time a visible human garment for my soul."
"Splendid!" answered Drysdale, with a sneering laugh. "You always had a powerful imagination, McCurdie. Well, I am going to deprive you of your garment once and for all."
He raised his arm and a shot rang out—but the tall figure stood motionless before him, the blue eyes steady on his own.
"Curse it!" muttered Drysdale, "This light" he fired again and yet again. "Die, can't you!" he shrieked, stumbling up close to that quiet figure, and putting the muzzle of his weapon to its breast he fired one shot after another in rapid succession; then fell with a wild yell of laughter to the ground, the smoking revolver clenched in his fingers.
Holbrook was the first to find him lying there, and hastily dropped his handkerchief over that agonized, grinning face, before the startled guests and servants poured into the room.
The paneled wall to the right of the fireplace was riddled with bullets; but no sign of blood—no foot nor fingerprint of any assailant did the keenest man from Scotland Yard ever discover.
What or whom Drysdale had tried to shoot was never known—for the dead can not speak; or if they do, they are not believed.
