THE AXTON LETTERS
293
"Dead."
"Dead?" Trant's face fell.
"Yes; he was the friend I spoke of that was lost—drowned in the wreck of the Gladstone just before Howard started home."
Trant picked up the next letter, which was dated and postmarked at Calcutta.
"Miss Waldron, I have seen him again," he read. "Who, you ask? My Moslem friend with a taste for your correspondence. You see, I can again joke about it; but really it was only last night and I am still in a perfect funk. It was the same man—I'll swear it—shoeless and turbaned and enjoying the pleasant pursuit of going through my writing desk for your letters. Did he follow us down the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean—over three thousand miles of ocean travel? I can imagine no other explanation—for I would take oath to his identity—the very same man I saw at Cairo, but now here in this Great Eastern Hotel at Calcutta, where we have two rooms at the end of the most noisome corridor that ever caged the sounds and odors of a babbling East Indian population, and where the doors have no locks. I had the end of a trunk against my door, notwithstanding the fact that an Indian servant I have hired was sleeping in the corridor outside across the doorway, but it booted nothing; for Lawler in the next room had neglected to fasten his door in any way, trusting to his servant, who occupied a like strategic position outside the threshold, and the door between our two rooms was open. I had been asleep in spite of everything—in spite of the snores and stertorous breathing of a floorful of sleeping humans, for the partitions between the rooms do not come within several feet of the ceiling; in spite of the distant bellowing of a sacred bull, and the nearer howl of a very far from sacred dog, and a jingling of elephant bells which were set off intermittently somewhere close at hand whenever some living thing in their neighborhood—animal or
