I told him I had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some researches in biology under Huxley. He raised his eyebrows slightly at that.
“That alters the case a little, Mr. Prendick,” he said, with a trifle more respect in his manner. “As it happens, we are biologists here. This is a biological station—of a sort.” His eye rested on the men in white who were busily hauling the puma, on rollers, towards the walled yard. “I and Montgomery, at least,” he added. Then, “When you will be able to get away, I can’t say. We’re off the track to anywhere. We see a ship once in a twelvemonth or so.”
He left me abruptly, and went up the beach past this group, and I think entered the enclosure. The other two men were with Montgomery, erecting a pile of smaller packages on a low-wheeled truck. The llama was still on the launch with the rabbit hutches; the staghounds were still lashed to the thwarts. The pile of things completed, all three men laid hold of the truck and began shoving the ton-weight or so upon it after the puma. Presently Montgomery left them, and coming back to me held out his hand.
“I’m glad,” said he, “for my own part. That captain was a silly ass. He’d have made things lively for you.”
“It was you,” said I, “that saved me again.”
“That depends. You’ll find this island an infernally rum place, I promise you. I’d watch my goings carefully, if I were you. He—” He hesitated, and seemed to alter his mind about what was on his lips. “I wish you’d help me with these rabbits,” he said.
His procedure with the rabbits was singular. I waded in with him, and helped him lug one of the hutches ashore. No sooner was that done than he opened the door of it, and tilting the thing on one end turned its living contents out on the ground. They fell in a struggling heap one on the top of the other. He clapped his hands, and forthwith they went off with that hopping run of theirs, fifteen or twenty of them I should think, up the beach.
“Increase and multiply, my friends,” said Montgomery. “Replenish the island. Hitherto we’ve had a certain lack of meat here.”
As I watched them disappearing, the white-haired man returned with a brandy-flask and some biscuits. “Something to go on with, Prendick,” said he, in a far more familiar tone than before. I made no ado, but set to work on the biscuits at once, while the white-haired man helped Montgomery to release about a score more of the rabbits. Three big hutches, however, went up to the house with the puma. The brandy I did not touch, for I have been an abstainer from my birth.
VII
The Locked Door
The reader will perhaps understand that at first everything was so strange about me, and my position was the outcome of such unexpected adventures, that I had no discernment of the relative strangeness of this or that thing. I followed the llama up the beach, and was overtaken by Montgomery, who asked me not to enter the stone enclosure. I noticed then that the puma in its cage and the pile of packages had been placed outside the entrance to this quadrangle.
I turned and saw that the launch had now been unloaded, run out again, and was being beached, and the white-haired man was walking towards us. He addressed Montgomery.
“And now comes the problem of this uninvited guest. What are we to do with him?”
“He knows something of science,” said Montgomery.
“I’m itching to get to work again—with this new stuff,” said the white-haired man, nodding towards the enclosure. His eyes grew brighter.
“I daresay you are,” said Montgomery, in anything but a cordial tone.
“We can’t send him over there, and we can’t spare the time to build him a new shanty; and we certainly can’t take him into our confidence just yet.”
“I’m in your hands,” said I. I had no idea of what he meant by “over there.”
“I’ve been thinking of the same things,” Montgomery answered. “There’s my room with the outer door—”
“That’s it,” said the elder man, promptly, looking at Montgomery; and all three of us went towards the enclosure. “I’m sorry to make a mystery, Mr. Prendick; but you’ll remember you’re uninvited. Our little establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Bluebeard’s chamber, in fact. Nothing very dreadful, really, to a sane man; but just now, as we don’t know you—”
“Decidedly,” said I, “I should be a fool to take offence at any want of confidence.”
He twisted his heavy mouth into a faint smile—he was one of those saturnine people who smile with the corners of the mouth down—and bowed his acknowledgment of my complaisance. The main entrance to the enclosure was passed; it was a heavy wooden gate, framed in iron and locked, with the cargo of the launch piled outside it, and at the corner we came to a small doorway I had not previously observed. The white-haired man produced a bundle of keys from the pocket of his greasy blue jacket, opened this door, and entered. His keys, and the elaborate locking-up of the place even while it was still under his eye, struck me as peculiar. I followed him, and found myself in a small apartment, plainly but not uncomfortably furnished and with its inner door, which was slightly ajar, opening into a paved courtyard. This inner door Montgomery at once closed. A hammock was slung across the darker corner of the room, and a small unglazed window defended by an iron bar looked out towards the sea.
This the white-haired man told me was to be my apartment; and the inner
