s another interval of silence.

When I could trust myself to look back at him he was out of his bed,
standing erect at the side of it. The pupils of his eyes were now
contracted; his eyeballs gleamed in the light of the candle as he moved
his head slowly to and fro. He was thinking; he was doubting--he spoke
again.

"How do I know?" he said. "The Indians may be hidden in the house."

He stopped, and walked slowly to the other end of the room. He
turned--waited--came back to the bed.

"It's not even locked up," he went on. "It's in the drawer of her
cabinet. And the drawer doesn't lock."

He sat down on the side of the bed. "Anybody might take it," he said.

He rose again restlessly, and reiterated his first words.

"How do I know? The Indians may be hidden in the house."

He waited again. I drew back behind the half curtain of the bed. He
looked about the room, with a vacant glitter in his eyes. It was a
breathless moment. There was a pause of some sort. A pause in the
action of the opium? a pause in the action of the brain? Who could tell?
Everything depended, now, on what he did next.

He laid himself down again on the bed!

A horrible doubt crossed my mind. Was it possible that the sedative
action of the opium was making itself felt already? It was not in my
experience that it should do this. But what is experience, where opium
is concerned? There are probably no two men in existence on whom
the drug acts in exactly the same manner. Was some constitutional
peculiarity in him, feeling the influence in some new way? Were we to
fail on the very brink of success?

No! He got up again abruptly. "How the devil am I to sleep," he said,
"with THIS on my mind?"

He looked at the light, burning on the table at the head of his bed.
After a moment, he took the candle in his hand.

I blew out the second candle, burning behind the closed curtains. I drew
back, with Mr. Bruff and Betteredge, into the farthest corner by the
bed. I signed to them to be silent, as if their lives had depended on
it.

We waited--seeing and hearing nothing. We waited, hidden from him by the
curtains.

The light which he was holding on the other side of us moved suddenly.
The next moment he passed us, swift and noiseless, with the candle in
his hand.

He opened the bedroom door, and went out.

We followed him along the corridor. We followed him down the stairs. We
followed him along the second corridor. He never looked back; he never