Juan and Michael took no chances on Don Jaime being intentionally or unintentionally undressed and thus exposed to detection. Last of all, the wig was hauled on, a delicate operation, and Juan, inspecting himself in the glass, sighed and made a face at the darkly handsome person that he saw there.
“I’ll be mighty glad when I get this mop off my head again,” he said, pushing up a corner of it in order to scratch, with deep satisfaction.
No matter where they were, Don Jaime and his valet slept in the same room. They had developed a system to which they were so accustomed that they did not have to discuss it, which was that Michael no more than dozed through the one night, and that Juan no more than dozed through the following.
That they were both alive had been due, several times, to this system. Now, therefore, as they took to their respective couches, Juan just said laconically:
“Yours.”
He then turned on his side, and in ten deep breaths was sleeping like a baby. Michael did not even doze. That “feeling” of his to which he could never give a name, but which less cautious people had called his “hunches,” made him sit up, after a time, and reach under his pillow for the pistol which was never out of his reach.
Two hours dragged by. Silently, like a shadow, he got up and went to stand by the light switch. There was nothing definite that he could put a finger on, except that twice he had thought he heard a foot in the corridor. Between the bedroom and the corridor there was the small sitting room, but he could look right at the outside door.
At three o’clock, by the radiolight watch on his wrist, Michael was of a mind to return to his bed. He was tired with standing absolutely still, than which there is nothing more exhausting. He would have moved a foot in another moment.
The faintest of sounds reached him. Had he not been straining to hear, it would have passed unnoticed. He slipped the pistol into his right hand and placed a finger of his left on the switch. The noise continued, if noise it could be called; it was little more than a whisper of a sound.
Slowly, then, the blank blackness of the wall in which the corridor door stood, changed. A slip of light glimmered for a second, and was instantly blotted out. Some one had opened the door just wide enough to squeeze through, had come into the sitting room, and had shut the door behind him.
Michael pressed down the finger which rested on the light switch.
A split second afterward, his gun and another roared. Juan, awaking with that instant alertness which was one of his powers, had fired at the same moment that the other had, at the figure crouched for a spring.
The figure’s hand, that one holding a long and shining knife, came toward the breast in a convulsive movement, and then the body plunged forward, along the floor, twitched, and lay still.
The air was still full of the faintly sweet odor of smokeless powder when feet came running in the corridor. The next moment some one knocked on the door, and then pushed it open.
The tableau still held. The frightened night steward saw the two passengers still holding their revolvers, and as he stared, the body on the floor gave a final convulsion.
The man’s eyes seemed as though they would fall from his head, so far did they appear to protrude, but he was well-trained, like all the servants of the great liners.
“What… what happened — sir?” he stammered.
Juan swung a long leg out of bed. “I don’t know, yet,” he said coolly. “I was awakened by the light coming on, and the moment that I opened my eyes I saw this fellow leaping at my man here with a knife in his hand. We both fired at the same moment, but I am sure you will find that my bullet did not kill him. I aimed for the shoulder.”
“I aimed for the legs,” said Michael. He was trembling a little. A fight never distressed him, small as he was, but the death of any human being affected him deeply. Juan threw on a bathrobe and walked over to him.
“Sit down, my dear fellow,” he said gently. “I am sure that you will find that you did not kill him, either.”
“I suppose we had better see if he is alive,” said the steward hesitatingly.
“No,” said Juan, “what we must do is to send for the doctor at once. You get those people who are filling the corridor out there into their rooms and send the doctor here. Tell them that my man shot at a thief — or, no — say that he shot by mistake at some one.
“The ship’s officers must do as they please about giving out the news. I will lock the door behind you, and you bring the doctor as soon as you can get him. Also the head steward, and one of the ship’s officers.”
The corridor was full of people in disarray, Juan saw, as he let the steward out and heard him explaining, and urging people to return to their cabins.
Michael had regained his composure.
“Well, he played a return engagement,” he said.
“That’s the man, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Huh! Well, that means that we are under a ban of some kind.” Then, Standing right over Michael, he went on, in their all but soundless talk: “All we know is that this is the man who came into the room after the girl. Careful. I begin to suspect everybody. This is a big thing we’ve headed into.”
A moment afterward there came a tap at the door, and Michael let in two of the ship’s officers, the head steward, and the doctor, who had with him a nurse from the hospital. Without a word he and she advanced to the crumpled figure and turned it over on its back, and it was then clear that both Michael and Juan were right in thinking that they had not killed the man.
There was a bullet wound in his right shoulder which would have made his knife useless to him, and there was a bullet in his left leg which would have checked his deadly rush, but that from which he had died was his own knife.
The two bullets, striking him almost simultaneously, had caused him to bring his right hand, with the knife in it, toward his own breast, and there it had sunk deep, and straight through his heart.
The man was naked above the waist save for a thin black “singlet,” evidently part of a scanty suit of union underwear. The knife had met with no such obstacle as it would have, had he been wearing the usual number of upper garments. However, he had fallen directly on it, and so his death was really inevitable.
He had on black, worn trousers, black socks, and rubber-soled black shoes. Arms, hands, face, and neck had been smeared with coal dust. It was obvious that in such an array, the man might have slipped about the ship at night and escaped notice.
There were several objects in his pockets. A purse in which there were ten pounds in English money, a bunch of skeleton keys, a pouch of tobacco, a very small pipe, a box of matches, a tin box in which there were four pieces of a popular brand of eating chocolate, a twenty-five pistol of beautiful workmanship. The knife which was imbedded in his heart had a common bone handle. The doctor drew it slowly out. It was a kitchen knife, thin and narrow and sharp, the kind which is used for cutting roast meat in thin slices.
“This is the man who came into this room after the girl,” said Michael, as the doctor turned and looked toward him, and he and Juan, together, then stated that, the valet being wakeful, he had heard the scrape of the key in the door, and had been standing right by the electric light switch when the man entered.
The light had awakened Don Jaime, and he and his man, seeing the sinister figure, crouched, knife in hand, had fired simultaneously. That was all that there was to tell, so far as they were concerned.
The doctor groaned. “The ship is surely having her share of excitement. I fear that Captain Shelburne will need my attention when he hears this,” he added with the ghost of a smile on his grave face. “In all the years that the Aquitania has been afloat nothing like this has ever occurred on her.