Although, save for this one lapse, our host throughout talked
gaily and entertainingly, I was obsessed by a memory of the expression
which I had detected upon his face that morning, the expression of a
doomed man.
What, in Heaven's name, I asked myself, did it all mean? If ever I saw
the fighting spirit looking out of any man's eyes, it looked out of the
eyes of Don Juan Sarmiento Menendez. Why, then, did he lie down to the
menace of this mysterious Bat Wing, and if he counted opposition
futile, why had he summoned Paul Harley to Cray's Folly?
With the passing of every moment I sympathized more fully with the
perplexity of my friend, and no longer wondered that even his highly
specialized faculties had failed to detect an explanation.
Remembering Colin Camber as I had seen him at the Lavender Arms, it was
simply impossible to suppose that such a man as Menendez could fear
such a man as Camber. True, I had seen the latter at a disadvantage,
and I knew well enough that many a genius has been also a drunkard. But
although I was prepared to find that Colin Camber possessed genius, I
found it hard to believe that this was of a criminal type.
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