Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 156: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

150 to the darkness he could make out the dark trees of the jungle. The hurricane- lamp was still burning on the poop, where Madame Scala—he presumed—was asleep. - j And then, he saw something that warned him that she couldn’t be asleep. From where he stood he could just see the poop deck, upon which two blankets lay wide apart and well away from the mattress, as if they had been cast hur- riedly aside. He was up the steps like a streak of lightning. There was no sign of the little woman there, though he looked every- where with the help of the lantern. And not only was she gone, but Liu Tang’s knife had also disappeared from where Madame Scala had said she had put it— on the iron seat aft of the deckhouse. Something was wrong—perhaps a tragedy had taken place! He must report at once to Quental. Even then, as he hurried for’ard, it occurred to him that the Chinese might have escaped. He came breathless to the captain’s cabin; in it there was still a light. As be- fore, he looked in through the porthole, and there Ferfiao Quental lay in much the same attitude as before. His head had fallen a little further back; his mouth was even more wide open, and one of his arms hung over the edge of the bunk, the hand touching the floor. Drugged senseless! Oblivious to the world of sentient things. Dreaming, per- haps, in blissful inconsequence and confu- sion. That much, at least, was sugges- ted by the expression on his face—the lips drawn back upon the teeth, lines at the corners of the eyes. He was likea man who would laugh aloud, had laughed not demanded a certain physical effort that was beyond him. A voluptuary who re- posed in some Garden of Armida of his own conception, or who floated upon wings of down through space, like Helios in his golden boat—and there above him, not an inch from his head, driven deep ‘into the woodwork of the cabin, was the gleaming blade of a knife. Eade knew that knife at a glance. He CHARLES GILSON recognized the ivory handle. It must have been hurled through the porthole~ with terrific force, for the sharp point was - an inch deep in the wood; and the blade had missed Quental’s skull by the breadth: of a little finger. While the man’s sub- conscious self drifted through an under- world of intangible delights, his physical body had tottered and quavered on the very brink of the grave. : Eade drew back, conscious of alarm, unanswerable questions revolving in his brain like changing colors before the eyes of a man who has stared at too bright a light. Where was Madame Scala? Dead? In the river—to be dragged from the mud by the crocodiles? He still had the hurricane-lamp that he - had brought with him from the poop. Pulling himself together with an effort, he went down the companionway to the cook’s galley, to the little cubbyhole in which he had seen Quental lock up the Chinese, Liu Tang. Sure enough, the door was open. He hadn’t expected anything else. The lock had been picked with a stiff piece of wire that the Chinese had not even troubled to remove from the keyhole. For a moment Eade stood half dazed. He found it difficult to thnk. Somehow he remembered Gottheimer’s phrase; he had come on board a “hell-boat.” The steaming heat, the surrounding im- penetrable darkness, the very silence punctuated by spasmodic, metallic groan- ings from the engine room—all served to foster the illusion. He was stranded on the Styx. CHAPTER III QUENTAL BECOMES CONFIDENTIAL ADE’S thoughts flew back to Madame Scala. He remembered her fear of the Chinese, her pal- pable and abject terror when she had first seen the man, who for some time during that night had been at large on board the Chauve-Souris. If, dead or alive, she were yet any- where in the ship, she must be found. comicloooks.com