. This quite novel impression of the dangers of
slumber made him think suddenly of his revolver. He left the bedroom
with noiseless footsteps. The lightness of the curtain he had to lift
as he passed out, and the outer door, wide open on the blackness of
the veranda--for the roof eaves came down low, shutting out the
starlight--gave him a sense of having been dangerously exposed, he could
not have said to what. He pulled the drawer open. Its emptiness cut his
train of self-communion short. He murmured to the assertive fact:

"Impossible! Somewhere else!"

He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked
whispers of memory were not encouraging. Foraging in every receptacle
and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly to the
conclusion that it was not in that room. Neither was it in the other.
The whole bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a profuse allowance of
veranda all round. Heyst stepped out on the veranda.

"It's Wang, beyond a doubt," he thought, staring into the night. "He has
got hold of it for some reason."

There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materializing
suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at any moment, and
toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger was so irremediable
that it was not worth worrying about, any more than the general
precariousness of human life. Heyst speculated on this added risk. How
long had he been at the mercy of a slender yellow finger on the trigger?
That is, if that was the fellow's reason for purloining the revolver.

"Shoot and inherit," thought Heyst. "Very simple." Yet there was in his
mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of vegetables
in the light of a murderer.

"No, it wasn't that. For Wang could have done it any time this last
twelve months or more--"

Heyst's mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed
himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at
that period of his speculation his point of view changed. It struck him
with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been taken
only late in the day, or on that very night. Wang, of course. But why?
So there had been no danger in the past. It was all ahead.

"He has me at his mercy now," thought Heyst, without particular
excitement.

The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in it: it
was as if he were considering somebody else's strange predicament. But