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At the height of the season such visitors are not rare, but this one had an odd personality, and moreover his keen gaze was raking the place from ceiling to floor. Where had I met him before? To the best of my recollection I had never set eyes upon the man prior to that moment; and since he was so palpably an American I had no reason for assuming him to be associated with the Hashishin.
"Dexter had suffered mutilation, he knew that the Hashishin sought his life for his previous attempts upon the relic of the Prophet, and yet he dared to venture again into the very lions' den?" "He did, Mr. Cavanagh, two days ago. And " "Yes?" I urged, as gently as I could, for she was shaking pitifully. "He never came back!" The words were spoken almost in a whisper.
I shall never forget the scene as Hassan entered, to stand looking with blazing eyes at The Stetson Man, who sat beside the fire with the slipper of Mohammed in his hand! "Hassan," said Dexter quietly, "Mr. Cavanagh has had to promise you safe conduct, or as sure as God made me, I'd put a bullet in you!" The Sheikh of the Hashishin glared fixedly at him.
It was Earl Dexter who had shot the yellow dwarf as he was bound for this very room! But how humanly the Hashishin had proposed to gain his goal, how he had travelled through empty space for from empty space the shot had brought him down I could not imagine. I knew something of the almost supernatural attributes of these people.
The encounter had presaged a further attempt upon the slipper! Certainly she acted on behalf of someone interested in it; and since neither Bristol nor I could conceive of any one seeking to possess the bloodstained thing except the mysterious leader of the Hashishin Hassan of Aleppo as a creature of that awful fanatic being I had written her down.
A gruesome conviction seized me, as irrational as the hope which it displayed, that this was one of the Hashishin an apish yellow dwarf, a strangler, the awful Hassan himself! The footsteps receded down the stairs. And my thoughts reverted into the old channels of dull despair.
I reflected bitterly how, having transferred my quarters to the Astoria, I could not well hope for any visitor to my chambers; and even the event of such a visitor had been foreseen and provided against by the cunning lord of the Hashishin.
He referred to the fact that De Sacy has shown the word Assassin to be derived from Hashishin, and quoted El-Idrisi to the same end. The Hashishin performed their murderous feats under the influence of hashish, or Indian hemp; and during the state of ecstasy so induced, according to Deeping, they acquired powers almost superhuman.
It had been a divine accident which had caused me to drop my revolver, and, stooping to recover it, unknowingly to frustrate the design of the second slinger upon myself. The light of the lamp fell upon the face of the dead Hashishin. He lay forward upon his hands, crouching almost, but with his face, his dreadful, featureless face, twisted up at me from under his left shoulder.
Why, then, if the mysterious Eastern employed a European girl, should he not also employ an American man? It might well be that the relic, in entering the doors of the impregnable Antiquarian Museum, had passed where the diabolical arts of the Hashishin had no power to reach it where the beauty of Western women and the craft of Eastern man were equally useless weapons.
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