With a choking cry, which forced itself unwilled from my lips, I tore
at the door, threw it open, and sprang across the deck. Plans, I had
none, and since I carried no instrument wherewith to sever the ladder,
the murderer might indeed have carried out his design for all that I
could have done to prevent him, were it not that another took a hand
in the game. . . .
At the moment that the mummy-man--his head now on a level with the
deck--perceived me, he stopped dead. Coincident with his stopping, the
crack of a pistol shot sounded--from immediately beyond the boat.
Uttering a sort of sobbing sound, the creature fell--then clutched,
with straining yellow fingers, at the rails, and, seemingly by dint of
a great effort, swarmed along aft some twenty feet, with incredible
swiftness and agility, and clambered onto the deck.
A second shot cracked sharply; and a voice (God! was I mad!) cried:
"Hold him, Petrie!"
Rigid with fearful astonishment I stood, as out from the boat above me
leaped a figure attired solely in shirt and trousers. The newcomer
leaped away in the wake of the mummy-man--who had vanished around the
corner by the smoke-room. Over his shoulder he cried back at me:
"The bishop's stateroom! See that no one enters!"
I clutched at my head--which seemed to be fiery hot; I realized in my
own person the sensation of one who knows himself mad.
For the man who pursued the mummy was Nayland Smith!
|