Page:Barbour--Joan of the ilsand.djvu/186

 T was the darkest hour of the night, preceding dawn. Tao Tao remained wrapped in slumber. The hot breath of the Pacific still soughed amid the palm tree leaves and set them a-rustling.

Keith stirred uneasily in his sleep. Perhaps some prescience of danger was calling him back to consciousness. Certainly there had been no sound in the bungalow louder than one slight creak, as though something had blundered against a chair. For the space of thirty seconds he breathed deeply and regularly again; and then he awoke with a start, lay still, and strained his ears. When wakefulness comes to a sailor in such a manner there is generally a reason. It may be that the wind has shifted a point or two, giving the vessel a slightly different motion. Or it may be that inexplicable sense, rarely given to the landsman, which makes him feel the imminence of danger when there is no apparent sign of it.

The soft wind was making a leaf outside tap-tap against the thin woodwork like the beating of a great moth's wings. Keith remembered he had heard it before, and, closing his eyes, decided to 174