Captain Ducie’s swarthy cheek deepened its hue.  He paused to blow a speck of cigar ash off his sleeve before he spoke.  “I did not know your Captain Charles Chillington,” he said, in slow, deliberate accents.  “Till the present moment I never heard of his existence.”

Captain Ducie pulled his Glengarry over his brows, folded his arms, and shut his eyes.  He had evidently made up his mind for a quiet snooze.  Platzoff regarded him with a silent snigger.  “Something I have said has pricked the gallant Captain under his armour,” he muttered to himself.  “Is it possible that he and Chillington were acquainted with each other in India?  But what matters it to me if they were?”

When M. Platzoff had smoked his meerschaum to the last whiff, he put it carefully away, and disposed himself to follow Ducie’s example in the matter of sleep.  He rearranged his wraps, folded the arms, shut his eyes, and pressed his head resolutely against his cushion; but at the end of five minutes he opened his eyes, and seemed just as wakeful as before.  “These beef-fed Englishmen seem as if they can sleep whenever and wherever they choose.  Enviable faculty!  I daresay the heifers on which they gorge possess it in almost as great perfection.”

Hidden away among his furs was a small morocco-covered despatch-box.  This he now proceeded to unlock, and to draw from it a folded paper which, on being opened, displayed a closely-written array of figures, as though it were the working out of some formidable problem in arithmetic.  Platzoff smiled, and his smile was very different from his cynical snigger, as his eyes ran over the long array of figures.  “I must try and get this finished as soon as I am back at Bon Repos,” he muttered to himself.  “I am frightened when I think what would happen if I were to die before its completion.  My great secret would die with me, and perhaps hundreds of years would pass away before it would be brought to light.  What a discovery it would be!  To those concerned it would seem as though they had found the key-note of some lost religion—­as though they had penetrated into some temple dedicated to the gods of eld.”

His soliloquy was suddenly interrupted by three piercing shrieks from the engine, followed by a terrible jolting and swaying of the carriage, which made it almost impossible for those inside to keep their seats.  Captain Ducie was alive to the danger in a moment.  One glance out of the window was enough.  “We are off the line?  Hold fast!” he shouted to Platzoff, drawing up his legs, and setting his teeth, and looking very fierce and determined.  M. Platzoff tried to follow his English friend’s example.  His yellow complexion faded to a sickly green.  With eyes in which there was no room now for anything save anguish and terror unspeakable, he yet snarled at the mouth and showed his teeth like a wolf brought hopelessly to bay.