Page 143 - the-thirty-nine-steps

ble in a kind of dream. The window was open and the moon
was flooding the cliffs and sea with a great tide of yellow
light. There was moonshine, too, in my head. The three had
recovered their composure, and were talking easily just the
kind of slangy talk you will hear in any golf club-house. I
must have cut a rum figure, sitting there knitting my brows
with my eyes wandering.
My partner was the young dark one. I play a fair hand
at bridge, but I must have been rank bad that night. They
saw that they had got me puzzled, and that put them more
than ever at their ease. I kept looking at their faces, but they
conveyed nothing to me. It was not that they looked differ-
ent; they were different. I clung desperately to the words of
Peter Pienaar.
Then something awoke me.
The old man laid down his hand to light a cigar. He didn’t
pick it up at once, but sat back for a moment in his chair,
with his fingers tapping on his knees.
It was the movement I remembered when I had stood
before him in the moorland farm, with the pistols of his ser-
vants behind me.
A little thing, lasting only a second, and the odds were a
thousand to one that I might have had my eyes on my cards
at the time and missed it. But I didn’t, and, in a flash, the air
seemed to clear. Some shadow lifted from my brain, and I
was looking at the three men with full and absolute recog-
nition.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten o’clock.
The three faces seemed to change before my eyes and re-

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