so. Found it contained five smaller parcels, four long shaped and one something like a large football.

He picked up one of the long parcels and felt it. It had a curious half hard feeling.

He sat on his berth again and opened it on his knees. There was no string round the parcel.

As he held the end of the paper it unwound itself, and the contents dropped on to the floor—a human arm and hand!

He clapped his own hand to his mouth and so stifled a scream.

It is all very well to be cool over your own murderous work, but when you come across another man's, it is apt to startle you. Loide was the most startled individual on the Atlantic at that particular moment.

He sat there in stony amazement and horror. He feared to open the other parcels. Still he had to.

Qualms had to be kept down. The possession of nineteen thousand pounds depended on his search.

He imagined that Depew had murdered some one in England, and was taking the body out, perhaps to hide traces of his crime in the sea.

So curiously fashioned was the lawyer's intellect that he was rather glad that he had killed Depew—looked[Pg 49] upon himself as a kind of weapon in the hand of justice.

[Pg 49]

There is no accounting for the kinks into which a man's intellect will twist.

The avenger idea gave him the necessary courage to go on examining the rest of the parcels. Not a solitary thing save of the awful kind the first was.

The big parcel in the other portmanteau made him shudder in horror. He was glad when he was able to shut the bags and get rid of the sight of those horrible bundles.

Then another bag—a little hand bag—caught his attention. He felt mad with himself that he had not examined that first.

It needed no key. A pressure of the lock opened it, and he turned the contents on the floor; collars, handkerchiefs, shirts, and socks—nothing else.

Once more he sat on his bunk—sat there with his chin in the palms of his hands, thinking.

How long he sat there he never knew. He was awakened by the steamer's gongs; the 

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