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 different; 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 servants 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 recognition.
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