The ship’s saloon, fitfully lighted by the swinging lamp with a
green shade, furnished a picturesque framing for the two figures it
contained. Mr Dick Denver, in loose garments of spotless white, sat
leaning carelessly back in one chair, with his legs resting on another;
a cigar in his mouth, his hands, with the cards in them, from habit
well held up, and the usual indifferent look upon his face. A great
contrast was the man sitting on the other side of the long, narrow
saloon table. Major Massinger, late of Her Majesty’s Service, a large,
bull-necked man with eyes like a cod fish, in a white mess jacket and
scarlet cummerbund, was sitting forward, burying a somewhat red face
in a beaker of brandy and soda. A box of cigars and picquet markers
testified to a long evening’s play, the last indeed of a series. To
those who knew him, the gallant Major’s boisterous joviality would have
betokened a winning night. His luck was ‘in,’ even to and beyond Dick’s
bottom dollar, but this beyondness, which might have been somewhat
disquieting to his opponent, was not to be gathered from Dick’s
impassive face.
‘Eleven o’clock--shall we conclude?’ said the latter.
‘Not a bit of it, unless you’re afraid of the luck?’
Dick answered by an amused look and a shrug of his shoulders, but he
said:
‘Won’t you disturb your wife if you stay here much longer?’
‘D----n my wife; you’ve evidently never been spliced, or you wouldn’t
be so beastly particular.’
Massinger turned as he said this to open another bottle of soda, and
missed the ugly look in Dick’s half-shut eyes.
‘All serene, then,’ said the latter--‘guess I owe you twelve hundred
and fifty dollars; well, now, I’ll play you double or quits, the best
of three games.’
‘What’s that in pounds? Two fifty, isn’t it? Very good! Go ahead, my
sportsman; double or quits, five hundred or nothing.’
Dick shuffled the cards and cut them; a breeze stole in at the open
skylight, and sighed fitfully through the saloon, and as it died away,
his sharp ears caught the ‘frou frou’ of a silk dress descending the
hatch.
‘One moment,’ he said--‘reckon I’ll just shut that door; there’s kind
of a hurricane playing around here;’ and, rising quickly, he moved to
the saloon door and stood there a moment, hat in hand, as a slender
white figure passed down the stairs. Her hand rested a moment in his as
she glided by, and Mr Denver shut the door and returned to his seat.
Massinger, manufacturing his fourth drink, saw nothing of this by-play,
and the game was resumed. But the tide had turned, and Massinger was
‘rubiconed’ twice running.
‘As you was before you was! Look here, Denver, can’t end up like this,
you know--it’s too infernal slow;’ his voice was getting thick and his
hand shook somewhat.
‘Mussh’t see the luck through, y’know, somehow’n other--no craning.’
Dick, a covert sneer on his face, was far too considerate to disappoint
him, and once again the cards were shuffled and dealt; the Major more
boisterous, Dick more impassive than ever. With the end of the partie
came the transference of £200 in notes from Massinger’s pocket-book
to Mr Denver’s. Undaunted, the Major slapped the latter on the back,
declaring him thickly to be a jolly good sportsman.
‘Have my revenge to-morrow night,--too tight now,’ said he.
‘Yes,’ assented Dick, cheerfully, ‘but I guess we get to St Martin
to-morrow, and I leave the ship.’
‘Oh, hang it! Never mind; I suppose we stay there a bit, eh?’
‘Two days,’ said Dick.
‘All right! I’ll play you on shore. Is there any solitary thing to see
in the d----d hole? My wife always wants to see everything, confound
her!’
Mr Denver apparently paid no heed to this remark; he was sitting tilted
back in his chair, his hat slouched over his brows, and only the
slight twitching of the hand holding the pocket-book, and a curious
smouldering fire in his half-closed eyes, showed that a struggle was
going on in his mind. Presently, with a sudden jerk, he returned to a
right-angled position, and stared straight at Massinger. The man looked
particularly like a cod-fish at that moment, and breathed heavily. Dick
shivered slightly and disgustedly. Through the open skylight above the
wind could be heard sighing in the sails, ‘God! How I hate him! How
long? How long?’ That was the refrain it took. A cold look of purpose
and resolution settled in Dick’s eyes--the crystallisation of a vague
idea.
‘Why, certainly no, not the smallest use! ’Pears to me as if there
might be a chance,’ he muttered unintelligibly to himself; and
fingering the pocket-book in his hand, he looked at the man opposite
with a calculating eye.
‘What’s the matter with you? You’re drunker than I am,’ said the
latter. ‘I ask you simply if there’s anything to see in the island,
and, begad, you’re jibbering like a boiled owl.’ He stooped unsteadily
to reach his glass under the table.
Mr Denver’s look was that of one who measures the distance for a spring.
‘Malūa! Malūa!’ (which is by interpretation ‘Go easy’). ‘I guess it can
be done,’ he drawled softly to himself. ‘Anything to see? No--o. Stop,
though,’--to the intelligent eye, as he drew himself together in his
chair, the spring was very near now--‘I guess I’m wrong all the time,
there _is_ something almighty curious to see, for those who have the
sand.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We--ell, it mightn’t interest _you_, but it’s a place they call “La
boîte du diable”--kind of a cavern in the side of a hill. Considerable
few people have been to see it, and none stayed very long. Reckon _you_
won’t care about it.’
An indescribable sneer was in Mr Denver’s voice, and the Major, though
far gone, was not _too_ far gone to seize upon it as an insult.
‘You mean, I wouldn’t dare,’ he said, huskily. ‘Confound you, sir,
d’you think I’ve not got as much pluck as you?’
‘Guess not,’ said Dick, drily.
‘D----n you, sir!’ said Massinger, furiously; ‘I’ll bet you that £200
I’ve just paid you, I go to that hole, whatever it is, and stay there
as long or longer than you do.’
For answer, Mr Denver rose slowly.
‘Put it in writing,’ he said, and, producing pen and paper out of
his pocket, he reached down the saloon ink-bottle, and pushed them
over to Massinger. The latter, quite sobered, stared a minute at his
nonchalant companion, then sat down, and without saying a word penned
the following lines in a shaky hand:
‘“I bet Mr Dick Denver the sum of £200 that I visit with him a
condemned hole called ‘La boîte du diable,’ and stay there as long or
longer than he does.”
‘Will that do?’
‘Play or pay,’ added Mr Denver, calmly.
‘“Play or pay.”
‘“Albert Massinger, October 9th, 188-”--he signed his name, and threw
it across to Dick, who signed his own, and pocketed the document.
‘Guess I’ll call for you after dinner at your hotel,’ he said; ‘might
be happier with pistols, it’s kind of a skeery place. Good-night,’ he
nodded, and without another word, lounged up on to the silent deck, the
suspicion of an unholy smile flickering on his impassive features.