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
hesitated.
He opened the sitting-room door, and went in, leaving it open behind
him.
The door was hung (like all the other doors in the house) on large
old-fashioned hinges. When it was opened, a crevice was opened between
the door and the post. I signed to my two companions to look
through this, so as to keep them from showing themselves. I placed
myself--outside the door also--on the opposite side. A recess in the
wall was at my left hand, in which I could instantly hide myself, if he
showed any signs of looking back into the corridor.