Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 9
“Rum start,” he mused. “No mistake about what I heard. It was clear enough; and the beggar spoke English as well as I do myself. May be some cove talking to a pal in London and using a prearranged private call sign of his own to prevent people butting in with QSLL demands for postcard acknowledgments. That’s it, most likely.”
Dismissing the matter from his thoughts, he turned away from the wireless and prepared to go up to bed. Then a question suggested itself to him. Should one lock up the front door? It seemed an absurd precaution to take on this lonely island, but perhaps it was the custom at Wester Voe. He had forgotten to ask Dinnet about it. Best be on the safe side, he decided eventually; locking the door could do no harm. He switched off the lights in the lounge and went out into the hall. Before locking up, he opened the front door and stepped to the edge of the loggia to see what sort of a night it was.
Clouds had gathered swiftly since he and Jean re-entered the house; and now only a few stars were to be seen, appearing and vanishing through the slowly-moving rifts. A faint wind stirred the unseen lupins beyond the garden, and their rustling mingled with the low plash of the waves on the shore below. Except for that the night was silent. No lights shone in the windows of Heather Lodge, across the bay. Ruffa, with its little group of inhabitants, seemed fast asleep in the loneliness of the sea. Colin, feeling the effect of the unaccustomed island air, yawned expansively and turned back towards the open door.
But as he did so his quick ear caught a new sound in the night, and he halted, rigid, listening for a recurrence.
CHAPTER III
THE WOUNDED MAN AND THE GOLD BRICK
THE sound came from beyond the gate of the garden, and as Colin listened he heard it again: a low scuffing noise such as a man might make as he shuffled along painfully in the last stages of exhaustion. Then it ceased, and Colin thought he heard a stumble, a soft thud of a body falling to the ground. Silence again. Then, distinctly, a short, low moan of pain.
Colin raced down the garden path to the gate and gazed out into the dark. He could see nothing, and for some moments he stared hither and thither, trying to pierce the night.
“Who’s there?” he demanded. “Are you badly hurt?”
There was no answer for a moment or two, then he heard another low groan from somewhere on his left, among the lupins. He hurried in the direction of the sound; but the darkness and the high-growing stems hindered his search, and he had to halt and listen again. Once more the dull sound of pain guided him; and, striding through the lupins, he almost tripped over a prostrate figure.
Colin knelt down, fumbled hurriedly in his pocket, found his matchbox and, struck a light. It lasted only a moment, for a puff of wind blew it out almost as soon as it flared up. In its brief illumination, Colin caught a glimpse of a flat, brutal face with a hare-lip. From among the roots of the coarse black hair a trickle of blood had flowed down on to the temple.
“Fallen and cut your head on a rock?” Colin inquired sympathetically as the match went out.
The invisible figure shifted slightly in an effort to sit up, and the movement drew from it another inarticulate sound of pain. Colin hastily lit another match, which shared the fate of the first. In its evanescent gleam, he saw a dark lounge suit which would have consorted with city pavements better than with the rock-strewn heather of Ruffa. Rubber-soled tennis shoes seemed equally unsuitable for the time and place.
“Feel pretty bad?” Colin asked kindly, as he put his arm round the man’s shoulders to support him.
There was no reply. The momentary glimpse of that brutish countenance had repelled Colin; but as he knelt with his arm about the figure of his protégé, his natural sympathies got the better of his distaste. Whatever the fellow might be, he was a badly-hurt man needing careful handling. And suddenly Colin felt the full weight of the body against his arm.
“Hullo! The beggar’s fainted,” he ejaculated to himself as he lowered the unconscious head to the ground.
Fainting was a new phenomenon to Colin. In his circle people simply did not faint. It wasn’t done. Consequently, he was at a loss to know what to do with his patient. What did one do to bring a man back to consciousness? If it had been a girl the proper treatment, Colin supposed, would be to splash water over her until she came to her senses. Or did one bum feathers under her nose? Anyhow, this was a man; and most likely the best thing for him was a stiff drink—whiskey neat. If it made him cough, he’d wake up all the quicker, probably.
Leaving the stranger lying among the lupins, Colin stepped back to the path and hurried up to the house. At dinner-time he had noticed a whiskey decanter on the sideboard, with a soda-siphon beside it. He went into the dining-room, switched on the lights, and was relieved to find that Dinnet had not removed the decanter. A hurried search through the