OR a moment not a sound broke the tense stillness. Sudo's face was twisted over his shoulder, and his beady black eyes, fixed steadily on Darrell's angry countenance, were blinking with extraordinary rapidity.
“Come to make clean honorable gentleman's room,” he said suddenly. “Find letter on floor. What do? I ask to know.”
The secret-service agent sprang forward, and snatched the paper from his limp fingers. “It wasn't on the floor!” he exclaimed savagely. “It was in—er—put away. What do you mean by prying into my things?”
The Jap shrugged his shoulders regretfully. His expression was one of injured innocence. “But yes, honorable sir,” he protested plaintively. “Here lay it beside of gripsack. I think only to make it safety.”
The secret-service agent glowered fiercely for a moment. “Did you read it?” he demanded, at length.
His voice was a wonderfully artistic blending of anger and nervousness. Sudo's shoulders went up again, and he tilted his head a little to one side.
“Not surely, honorable one,” he returned blandly. “Education pretty soon advance to read of English, but not yet, alas!”
Darrell stared for a second longer, and then burst into a laugh. “It wouldn't really matter if you had, Sudo,” he said, in palpably affected carelessness. “I was only fooling. This is trash—nothing important.” He crumpled the paper, and thrust it casually into his pocket. “I thought I stuffed it into the bag, but I must have dropped it outside, instead. Go ahead and straighten up if you want to.”
Clapping the smiling Jap reassuringly on the back, he found his handkerchief, and returned to the deck.
A little later, when he and Bellamy were alone, he took pleasure in informing his friend that the mouse had been caught.
“He took the bait, but whether he swallowed it or not I don't know,” he concluded. “There's only one thing for us to do now, and that's keep our faces closed about our affairs unless we happen to be alone in the middle of the deck in broad daylight.”
The astute little Sudo was not the only person aboard ship about whom Darrell was decidedly curious. Puzzling to begin with, the personality of Philip Carmen soon became something which absorbed a large proportion of the secret-service agent's thoughts. Watching him quietly and unobtrusively from day to day, the government official presently reached the conclusion that his lazy, languid, drawling pose was nothing more than a mask to hide the man's real self. What that real self might be even Darrell, with all his acuteness and ability at reading character, had so far failed to determine, for there was no question of Carmen's amazing cleverness.
To see him lying stretched out on a disreputable steamer chair he had unearthed from no one knew where, smoking innumerable cigarettes, or twisting the little blond mustache as he drawled out the details of some unusual experience, one would have set him down as a brainless fop. Yet, try as he might in every way short of downright questioning, Darrell had been utterly unable to discover his occupation, his reason for traveling on such a vessel as the Golden Horn, or a single vital fact about him. This might, of course, have been due to an airy, inconsequential nature. There were one or two things, however, which made Darrell reject that theory.
After three days of quiet observation and study, he became aware of a vague, haunting sense of familiarity. It was not nearly so strong as a remembrance. His wonderful memory, cultivated by years in the service, made it impossible for him ever to forget a face, no matter how altered or disguised it might be. It was rather a curious feeling that Philip Carmen resembled some one of whom he had heard or been told. It even reached the point where he felt quite certain that the man was associated with some phase of his official position; but there his mind balked, stubbornly refusing to reveal anything further.
This nagging sense of familiarity reached a climax the night before they were due at Magdalena Bay. There was a low, thin moon that faintly crested the ocean swells with silver. The three men were sitting together, as usual, on deck, Carmen spread out on his steamer chair, smoking the inevitable cigarette. They had been discussing the Panama Canal—a safe, comfortable subject—but a short time before he had relapsed into a silence which remained unbroken.
Whether it was the choice of subject or not, Darrell did not know, but he was possessed of a tantalizing feeling that the man's identity was close behind the curtain of his own memory, ready to leap forth at a phrase, perhaps even at a single illuminating word.