Because of the fatigue which possessed his every muscle, fatigue springing from the arduous, the trying hours now past, Peter the Brazen was sleeping the slumber of the worthy, when, at a somewhat later hour in the night, some time before dawn crept out of the China Sea, a figure, lean and gray, flitted past his stateroom on the narrow orlop deck, peered in the darkened port-hole, and passed on.
Awakened by an instinct developed to a remarkable degree by his training of the past few months, Peter established himself upon one elbow and looked and listened, wondering what sounds might be abroad other than the peaceful churn of the engine.
Quite as intuitively he slipped his hand under the pillow and encountered the reassuring chill of the blued steel. Half withdrawing this excellent weapon, he shifted his eyes, alternately from the door to the port-hole, conscious of an imminent danger, a little stupefied by his recent plunge into the depths of sleep, but growing more widely awake, more alert and watchful, with the passage of each instant.
The port-hole loomed gray and empty, one edge of it licked by the yellow light of some not far distant deck-lamp. With his eye fastened upon this scimitar of golden light, Peter was soon to witness an unusual eclipse, a phenomenon which sent a shiver, an icy shiver, of genuine consternation up and down his backbone.
As he watched, a square of the yellow reflected light was blotted out, as though a bar of some nature had cast its shadow athwart that metallic gleam. This shadow then proceeded to slide first up and then down the brass setting of the port-hole, and the shadow dwindled.
As Peter sat up on the edge of his cot, gripping the square butt of the automatic in his hand and tentatively fingering the trigger, the origin of the shadow moved slowly, ever so slowly, into the range of his perplexed and anxious vision.
What appeared at first glance to be a cat-o'-nine-tails on a rather thick stem, Peter made out to be, as he built some hasty comparisons, the Maxim silencer attached either at the end of a revolver or of a rifle; for the black cylinder on the muzzle was circumscribed at regular intervals with small, sharp depressions, the clinch-marks of the silencing chambers.
As this specter crept up and over the edge of the port, Peter, with a deliberate and cold smile, raised the automatic revolver, slipped out of the berth with the stealth and litheness of a cat, crept into the corner where the stateroom door was hinged, and leveled the weapon until his eye ran along the dark obstruction of the barrel.
Slowly and more slowly the silencer moved inward until the blunt end of it was registered precisely upon a point where Peter's head would lie if he were sleeping in a normal attitude.
This amused him and perplexed him. All Peter wanted to see was the head or even the eye of this early morning assassin, whereupon he would take immediate steps to receive him with a warm cordiality that might forestall future visitations of a kindred sort.
In the space between heart-beats Peter stopped to inquire of himself who his visitor might be. And even as he stopped to inquire, a bright, angry, red flame spurted straight out from the mouth of the silencer, and Peter would have willingly gambled his bottom dollar that the bullet found its way into his pillow, a wager, as he later verified, upon which he would have collected all of the money he was eager to stake.
The lance of yellow-red flame had occasioned no disturbance other than a slight smack, comparable with the sharp clapping of a man's hands.
In the second leaping flame Peter was far more interested. Having delivered himself of one shot, the assassin could be depended upon to make casual inquiries, and to drop at least one more bullet into the darkness between the upper and lower berths, to make a clean job of it.
And it was on the appearance of the inquiring head that Peter relied to repay the intruder in his own metal, that metal taking the form of a wingless messenger of nickel-sheathed lead.
But the visitor was cautious, waiting, no doubt, for sounds of the death struggle, provided the shot had not gone directly home, its home being, as Peter shuddered to think, his own exceedingly useful brain.
He waited a little longer before his guest apparently decided that the time was come for his investigation; and thereupon a small, square head with the black-tasseled hat of a Chinese coolie set upon it at a rakish angle was framed by the port-hole.
Smirking nervously, Peter released the safety catch and brought pressure to bear slowly and firmly upon the trigger.
Click! That was all. But it told a terrible story. The weapon was out of commission, either unloaded or tampered with. And Peter's panic-stricken thoughts leaped, even as the square head leaped away from the window, to the Borria woman, to the cause of his desperate helplessness.
Romola Borria, then, had tampered with this revolver. Romola Borria had plotted, that was sure, with the coolie outside the port-hole for his assassination. That explained the visit to his room. That explained her perturbation over his discovery of her visit, of her sly and cool evasions and dissimulations.
It was with these thoughts hammering in his brain that Peter dropped out of range of the deadly porthole and squirmed, inching his way into the doubtful shelter provided by the closet. At any instant he expected another red tongue to burn the now still darkness above his head, to experience the hot plunge of a bullet in some part of his slightly clad anatomy. And then--death? An end of the glorious adventures whose trail he had followed now for well upon ten years?
And still the death bullet was withheld. Groping about in the darkness with one hand as he loosened the magazine clip on the butt, and finding that the clip of cartridges had been removed, he finally discovered the whereabouts of the suit-case, and dragged it slowly toward him, with his eyes pinned upon the vacant port.
Fumbling among the numerous objects contained in the suit-case, his fingers encountered at length a cartridge clip. He slipped this into the magazine, and indulged in a silent grunt of relief as the clip moved up into place. He drew back the rejecting mechanism, and heard the soft, reassuring snick of the cartridge as it slid from the magazine into the chamber.
Then sounds without demanded his attention, the sounds of a tussle, of oaths spoken in a high, feminine tongue, in a language not his own.
Peter would have shouted, but he had long ago learned the inadvisability of shouting when such grim business as to-night's was being negotiated.
Slipping on his bath-robe, he opened the door and tentatively peered out into the half-light of the orlop deck from the cross corridor vestibule-way, for indications of a shambles.
They were gone. The deck was deserted. But he caught his breath sharply as he made out a long, dark shape which lay, with the inertness of death, under his port-hole, blending with the shadows. He rolled the man over upon his back, and dragged him by the heels under the deck-light, and, dragging him, a dark trail spread out upon the boards, and even as Peter examined the cold face, the spot broadened and a trickle broke from it and crept down toward the gutter.
Stabbed? More than likely. Pausing only long enough to reassure himself that this one was the assassin whose square head had been framed by the port, Peter looked for a wound, and shortly he found the wound, and Peter was not greatly astounded at the proportions thereof.
It was a small wound, running entirely through the neck from a point below the left ear to one slightly below and to the right of the locked jaw. Upon close scrutiny the death wound proved to be small and thorough and of a triangular pattern.
Just why he had expected to find that triangular wound Peter was unable to explain even to himself, but he was quite as sure that Romola Borria's hand was in this latest development as he had been sure a moment before that her steady, small hand had deliberately removed the clip of cartridges from the butt of the automatic, to render him helpless in the face of his enemies.
Silently contemplating the stiffening victim of Romola Borria's triangular dagger, Peter heard the rustle of silk garments, and looked up in time to observe the slender person of Romola Borria herself, attired exactly as he had left her a few hours previous, detach itself from the corridor vestibule-way which led to his stateroom. She approached him.
A thousand questions and accusations swam to his lips, but she was speaking in low, impassioned tones.
"I knocked at your door. God! I thought he had killed you! I was afraid. For a moment I thought you were dead."
"You stabbed him," said Peter in an expressionless voice.
She nodded, and drew a long, sobbing breath.
"Yes. He tried to shoot you. I saw him pass my window. I was waiting. I watched. I knew he would try. Oh, I'm so glad----"
"You knew? You knew that?"
"Yes, yes. He was the--the mate of the coolie you threw overboard in Batavia. You know, they always travel in pairs. You didn't know that?"
"No; I did not know. But I could have defended myself easily enough if it had not been for----"
"Your clip of cartridges? Can you forgive me? Can you ever forgive me for taking them out? I took them out. Oh, Mr. Moore, believe me, I am concealing nothing! I did remove the clip, and in my carelessness I forgot to give them back to you when you left my room."
"I see. Have you them?"
"Yes."
"Please give them to me. You have not by any chance, in another of those careless moods of yours, happened to tamper with the bullets, have you?"
"Mr. Moore----" she gasped, clutching her white hands to her breast in indignation.
"You are clever," said Peter sarcastically. "You're altogether too damn clever. What your game is, I'm not going to take the trouble to ask. You--you----"
"Oh, Mr. Moore!" She caught his arm.
He cast it away.
"Didn't tamper with the bullets, eh?" he went on in a deep, sullen voice. "Well, Miss Borria, here is what I think of your word. Here is how much I trust you."
And with a single motion Peter whipped all seven cartridges from the clip and tossed them into the sea. He snarled again:
"You are clever, damn clever. Poor, poor little thing! Still want to go to Japan with me, my dear?"
"I do," stated the girl, whose eyes were dry and burning.
"Sure! That's the stuff," railed Peter bitingly; "whatever you do, stick to your story."
He grabbed her wrist, and her glance should have softened granite.
"For example," he sniffed; "that neat little cock-and-bull story you made up about your cruel, brutal husband. Expect me to believe that, too, eh?"
"Not if you don't care to," said the girl faintly.
Peter knocked away her hand, the hand which seemed always to fumble at her throat in moments of strain. He pulled down the black kimono and dragged her under the light, forcing her back against the white cabin. He looked.
The white, soft curve of her chest was devoid of all marks. It was as white as that portion of a woman's body is said to be, by the singing poets, as white as alabaster, and devoid of angry stripes.
Peter seized both limp wrists in one of his hands.
"By God, you are clever!" he scoffed. "Now, Miss Enigma, you spurt out your story, and the true story, or, by Heaven, I'll call the skipper! I'll have you put in irons--for murder!"
She hung her head, then flung it back and eyed him with the sullen fire of a cornered animal.
"You forget I saved your life," she said.
As if they were red hot, Peter dropped her hands, and they fell at her sides like limp rags.
"I--I----" he stammered, and backed away a step. "Good God!" he exploded. "Then explain this; explain why you took the clip from my automatic. Explain why you put up that story of a brutal husband, and showed me scars on your breast to prove it--then washed them off. And why--why you killed this man who would have murdered me."
"I will explain what I am able to," she said in a small, tired voice. "I took the clips from the revolver because--because I didn't want you to shoot me. I know their methods far better than you seem to; and I knew I could handle this coolie myself far better than you could; and I wanted to run no risk of being shot myself in attending to him.
"As for the 'brutal-husband story,' every word of that is the truth. If you must know, I used rouge for the scars. Since you are so outspoken, I will pay you back in the same cloth. There are scars on my body, on my back and my legs."
Her face was as red as a poppy.
"And I killed this man because--well," she snapped, "perhaps because I hate you."
Had she cut him with a whip, Peter could not have felt more hurt, more humiliated, more ashamed, for gratitude was far from being a stranger to him.
He half extended his arms in mute apology, and, surprised, he found her lips caressing his, her warm arms about his neck. He kissed her--once--and put her away from him; and that guiding star of his in California could be thankful that Romola Borria's embrace was rather more forgiving than insinuating.
"We must get rid of this coolie," she said, brushing the clusters of dark hair from her face. "I will help you, if you like. But over he goes!"
"But the blood."
"Call a deck-boy. Tell him as little as you need. You are one of the ship's officers. He will not question you."
He hesitated.
"Can you forgive me for this--way I have acted, my--my ingratitude?"
"Forgiveness seems to be a woman's principal role in life," she said with a tired smile. "Yes. I am sorry, too, that we misunderstood. Good-night, my dear."
And Peter was all alone, although his aloneness was modified to a certain extent by the corpse at his feet. The dead weight he lifted with some difficulty to the railing, pushed hard, and heard the muffled splash. Quickly he got into his uniform, slipped his naked feet into looped sandals, and sought the forecastle.
The occupants of this odorous place were sawing wood in an unsynchronous chorus. No one seemed to be about, so he seized a pail half filled with sujee, a block of holystone, and a stiff broom.
With these implements he occupied himself for fully a half-hour, until the spots on the deck had faded to a satisfactory whiteness. The revolver with Maxim silencer attached he discovered, after a long search, some distance away in the deck-gutter.
He meditated at length upon the advisability of consigning this grim trophy to the China Sea. Yet it is a sad commentary upon his native shrewdness that Peter had not yet recovered from his boyish enthusiasm for collecting souvenirs.
At last he decided to retain it, and he dropped it through the port-hole upon the couch, thereupon forgetting all about it until the weapon was called to his attention on the ensuing morning.
With all evidences of the crime removed, he replaced the pail, the stone, and the broom in the forecastle locker, and sneaked back to his stateroom. He locked the door, barricaded the port-hole with the pink-flowered curtains--those symbols which had reminded him earlier of springtime in California--and examined his pillow.
It had been an exceedingly neat shot. The bullet had bored clean through, had struck the metal L-beam of the bunk, and rebounded into a pile of bedclothes. Dented and scorched, Peter examined this little pellet of lead, balancing it in the palm of his hand.
"Every bullet has its billet," he quoted, and he was glad indeed that the billet in this case had not been his vulnerable cerebrum.
Snapping off the light, he drew the sheet up to his neck and lay there pondering, listening to the whine of the ventilator-fan.
The haggard, distressed face of Romola Borria swam upon the screen of his imagination. This woman commanded his admiration and respect. Despite all dissemblings, all evasions, all actual and evident signs of the double-cross, he confided to his other self that he was glad he had kissed her. What can be so deliciously harmless as a kiss? he asked himself.
And wiser men than Peter have answered: What can be so harmful?
