ed up at
some sailor's auction. He was speaking to my uncle and his careful
precise sentences in the English tongue, coming from the creature,
seemed thereby to take on added menace.

"Is it wise, Sahib," he said, "to leave any man behind us in this
house?"

"We can do nothing else," replied my uncle.

The Oriental continued with the same carefully selected words:

"Easily we can do something else, Sahib," he said, "with a bar of pig
securely lashed to the ankles, the sea would receive them."

"No, no," replied my uncle, busy with his letters and the candle. The
big Oriental did not move.

"Reflect, Sahib," he went on. "We are entering an immense peril. The
thing that will be hunting us has innumerable agencies everywhere in
its service. If it shall discover that we have falsified its symbols,
it will search the earth for us. And what are we, Sahib, against this
thing? It does not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary."

"The lad knows nothing," replied my uncle, "and old Andrew will keep
silent."

"Without trouble, Sahib," the creature continued, "I can put the young
one beyond all knowledge and the old one beyond all speech. Is it
permitted?"

My uncle got up from the fireplace, for he had finished with his work.

"No," he said, "let there be an end of it."

He turned about, and under the glimmer of the candle I could see that
the man had changed; his big pale face was grim with some determined
purpose, and there was about him the courage and the authority of one
who, after long wavering, at last hazards a desperate venture. He broke
the glass box and put the Buddha into his pocket.

"It is good silver," he said, "and it has served its purpose."

The Oriental got softly onto his feet like a great toy of cotton wood.
His face remained in its expression of equanimity, and he added no
further word of gesture to his argument.

My uncle held the door open for him to pass out, and after that he
extinguished the candle and followed, closing the door noiselessly
behind him.

The thing was like a scene acted in a playhouse. But it accomplished
what the playhouse fails in. It put the fear of death into one who
watched it. To me in the dark hall, looking through the crack of the
door, the placid Oriental in his English uniform, and with his precise
words like an Oxford don, was surely the most devilish agency that ever
urged the murder of innocent men on an accomplice.

The wind was continuing to rise and the mis