Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 6 (1926-06).djvu/142

Three hours later Powell was closeted with Captain Brand. Soon the purser was summoned.

"Give Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Powell berths in my cabin," the captain ordered. "Place them at my table, Mr. Sims. And send up the passenger list immediately. . . Most remarkable. . . Unbelievable. . ."

Little was gained from studying the passenger list. There were many Chinese aboard the Empress, Hoys, Sings, Moosoongs, Lees, Wus,—more than a hundred in all. If June's abductors were aboard only a magician could pick out their names.

Nor did meal-time bring John Powell any nearer the solution; there were many Oriental men in the dining rooms; most of them answered the description, "tall, swarthy."

"We're stuck," Powell admitted to Mr. Hubbard soon after noon. "It ought to be easy to find your daughter's abductors, but it isn't. We aren't sure enough that they are here so that the captain can order a general search of every room. . . Let me think the thing out. . ."

Half an hour later John Powell went to the captain to get permission to borrow the ship's carpenter and the ship's electrician.

Captain Brand issued a general order at dinner that night. Every person aboard must attend a meeting at 8 o'clock in the grand salon to be instructed in procedure in case of fire or accident, he announced, and his officers carried the word to every part of the ship.

At 8 o'clock the first mate began a talk on the use of life-belts before a crowded salon. Every passenger aboard had been herded into the room. The mate talked rapidly, assigning positions, apportioning boats. Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, the room was plunged into blackness. Every light was out.

Passengers huddled together in the salon; it was weird, fearful, the way the great vessel plunged through the darkness, blind, black. The uncanniness was increased when strains of music sounded somewhere, wild sounds from stringed instruments which grew insistently louder, like a wind gaining in volume. Then the weird climax———

Overhead in the blackness a faint green light appeared. It seemed to float overhead, across the ceiling of the salon. Gradually it grew stronger, a ghastly, phosphorescent glow. It took outline—the outline of a great foot, a giant foot, green and terrible. Suddenly on its side a jagged spot shone, blood-red and shaped like a huge human tooth.

For the fraction of a minute the strange apparition glowed, then the ship's lights flashed on again. For a dazed second the passengers remained staring at the great foot. Then they laughed uneasily. The foot was a wood-and-canvas affair, crude and rough, with a red tooth painted on its side, the whole thing strung with many wires. The spectral foot was a joke of the ship's crew, of course! The passengers crowded forward to examine it. But not John Powell.

In the first flash of the lights he searched the crowded salon; in that second he saw what he had hoped to see and feared he would not see—a group of Chinese men, their heads touching the floor in worship of that great green foot. "There!" Powell called to Mr. Hubbard. "Keep an eye on them until I can get to them!"

But the Orientals quickly rose