ook or other and produced
from it a truly gorgeous sleeping-suit of gaily-striped silk; it
occupied him quite twenty minutes to get undressed and into this
grandeur, and even then he lingered, fiddling about in carefully
folding and arranging his garment. In the course of this, and in
moving about the narrow cabin, he took apparently casual glances at
Baxter and the Frenchman, and I saw from his satisfied, quiet smirk
that each was sound and fast asleep. And then he thrust his feet into
a pair of bedroom slippers, as loud in their colouring as his
pyjamas, and suddenly turning down the lamp with a twist of his
wicked-looking fingers, he glided out of the door into the darkness
above. At that I, too, glided swiftly back to my blankets.

CHAPTER XXII

RED DAWN

I heard steps, soft as snowflakes, go along the deck above me; for an
instant they paused by the open door at the head of my stairway; then
they went on again and all was silent as before. But in that silence,
above the gentle lapping of the water against the side of the yawl, I
heard the furious thumping of my own heart--and I did not wonder at
it, nor was I then, nor am I now ashamed of the fear that made it
thump. Clearly, whatever else it might mean, if Baxter and the
Frenchman were, as I surely believed them to be, soundly drugged, Miss
Raven and I were at the positive mercy of a pack of Chinese
adventurers who would probably stick at nothing.

But my problem--one sufficient to wrack every fibre of my brain--was,
what were they after? The Chinese gentleman in the flamboyant pyjamas
had without doubt, repaired to his compatriots in the galley, forward:
at that moment they were, of course, holding some unholy conference.
Were they going to murder Baxter and the Frenchman for the sake of the
swag now safely on board? It was possible: I had heard many a tale far
less so. No doubt the supreme spirit was a man of subtlety and craft;
so, too, most likely was our friend Lo Chuh Fen; the other two would
not be wanting. And if, of these other two, Wing, as Miss Raven had
confidently surmised and as I thought it possible, was one, then,
indeed, there would be brains enough and to spare for the carrying out
of any adventure. It seemed to me as I lay there, quaking and sweating
in sheer fright--I, a defenceless, quiet, peace-loving gentleman of
bookish tastes, who scarcely knew one end of a revolver from the
other--that what was likely was that the Chinese wer