with dinner so near," I laughed to conceal my own excitement. "Some day I may tell it to you, and I promise you will find it unusual. However, you have shown me one thing: that a ring of such importance should not remain hidden in the pockets of one's clothing, but displayed where all can see it."
And I slipped the heavy band on my end finger.
Inwardly I had not felt the calmness I displayed. There was, I knew, at least one person who could have told the history of the ring, as well as several other matters that had been puzzling me for days. I made a mental note to question The Midnight Lady at the first opportune moment.
We had left our deck chairs en route to the smoking-room when my companion, whose stateroom was next to mine, asked a strange and sudden question:
"Tell me, Mr. O'Hara." He spoke with the awkward manner of one who begins an embarrassing subject. "Have—have you been hearing any strange noises during the past two nights?" His gray eyes looked quizzically into mine.
"Strange noises?"
"Then you have heard nothing to disturb you?"
At my somewhat surprised and negative answer, he shrugged his shoulders with a puzzled smile.
"It must be nerves," he admitted. "Yet I could have sworn that during the dead of night I heard soft whining and the scratching of claws before our doors—like that of some wild animal seeking entrance."
It was late that night before I entered my cabin. In the morning we would dock and there was much that was before me, but the beauty of a tropical moon had kept me on deck till nearly midnight.
Even then I did not seek my berth, but sitting in a corner in the darkness of the room, I meditatively fingered the ring that was to be my one credential in a strange unknown land. For a while my thoughts were many, but presently all grew hazy. Heavy eyelids gradually closed, the cigarette went cold and unlighted, at last to fall to the carpet as my head sank forward on my chest.
The hours passed and the moon rose till its white beams poured through the port-hole, but still I slept. It was close on to four in the morning when with a quick intake of breath I came to myself. I looked sleepily around, but in the dim light of the room its contents were barely discernible. For a moment I was puzzled as to the reason of my sudden awakening, and then in an instant I was conscious of its cause.
It was a sound—the sound of a soft whining as my cabin door was being slowly opened!
Amid the rumbling of the ship's engines and splashing of the waves I could hear it—a soft, impatient whine, together with a heavy breathing. Silently, my eyes glued to the doorway, I gathered myself together as a tall figure in a white shirt appeared in the opening, and the cool night air came whistling into the room. As I tensed myself to attack, with the stealth of a cat the intruder glided into the cabin and closed the door behind him. But at the same instant I sprang from my chair and hurtled toward him.
Even as I launched myself, a foul, almost suffocating odor rose up to meet me, like that of some wild animal's cage gone uncleaned for weeks.
I crashed against the unknown, and together we fell to the floor. Two arms of almost superhuman strength sought to encircle me as a hairy body was
