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 c