Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/123

 to him? All this mad talk about trusting a dagger, asking a senseless, lifeless length of forged steel to speak to him!

His hand fingered the hilt of the weapon—he had not unsheathed it since that night in Coal Yard Street—while his mind, like a captive bird, was beating against the cage bars of his prosy, two-and-two-is-four intelligence, his typically British refusal to believe the incredible—even after he had seen it happen.

Then his lips curled in a lop-sided smile.

“Oh, well,” he murmured, apologetically, in the general direction of the moon that was racing through the clouds like delicate ivory flotsam, “it can't hurt,” and he drew the blade from the jeweled shagreen scabbard into which Ali Yusuf Khan had fitted it and, from a piece of silver wire scroll work just below the hilt where it had been wedged, a paper fluttered to the ground.

Mechanically he picked it up, and saw that there were words on it, in Persian, signed “Ali Yusuf Khan,” and read;

Hector gave a low laugh. He did not know why he laughed; did not have time to psychologize about it. For, the next second, he had picked up his hat, left the room and the hotel, and was out into the smoky, purple, fantastic Indian night, while, two seconds later, his mind and body acting together with almost uncanny