<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<h1><span>THE<br/>THOUSANDTH WOMAN</span><br/><br/><span id="id1"><i>By</i></span> <span>ERNEST W. HORNUNG</span></h1>
<h2><span>I</span> <span class="smaller">A SMALL WORLD</span></h2>
<p>Cazalet sat up so suddenly that his head hit the woodwork over the upper
berth. His own voice still rang in his startled ears. He wondered how
much he had said, and how far it could have carried above the throb of
the liner's screws and the mighty pounding of the water against her
plates. Then his assembling senses coupled the light in the cabin with
his own clear recollection of having switched it off before turning
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</SPAN></span>over. And then he remembered how he had been left behind at Naples, and
rejoined the <i>Kaiser Fritz</i> at Genoa, only to find that he no longer had
a cabin to himself.</p>
<p>A sniff assured Cazalet that he was neither alone at the moment nor yet
the only one awake; he pulled back the swaying curtain, which he had
taken to keeping drawn at night; and there on the settee, with the
thinnest of cigarettes between his muscular fingers, sat a man with a
strong blue chin and the quizzical solemnity of an animated sphinx.</p>
<p>It was his cabin companion, an American named Hilton Toye, and Cazalet
addressed him with nervous familiarity.</p>
<p>"I say! Have I been talking in my sleep?"</p>
<p>"Why, yes!" replied Hilton Toye, and broke into a smile that made a
human being of him.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Cazalet forced a responsive grin, as he reached for his own cigarettes.
"What did I say?" he asked, with an amused curiosity at variance with
his shaking hand and shining forehead.</p>
<p>Toye took him in from crown to fingertips, with something deep behind
his kindly smile. "I judge," said he, "you were dreaming of some drama
you've been seeing ashore, Mr. Cazalet."</p>
<p>"Dreaming!" said Cazalet, wiping his face. "It was a nightmare! I must
have turned in too soon after dinner. But I should like to know what I said."</p>
<p>"I can tell you word for word. You said, 'Henry Craven—dead!' and then
you said, 'Dead—dead—Henry Craven!' as if you'd got to have it both
ways to make sure."</p>
<p>"It's true," said Cazalet, shuddering. "I saw him lying dead, in my dream."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Hilton Toye took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. "Thirteen
minutes to one in the morning," he said, "and now it's September
eighteenth. Take a note of that, Mr. Cazalet. It may be another case of
second sight for your psychical research society."</p>
<p>"I don't care if it is." Cazalet was smoking furiously.</p>
<p>"Meaning it was no great friend you dreamed was dead?"</p>
<p>"No friend at all, dead or alive!"</p>
<p>"I'm kind of wondering," said Toye, winding his watch up slowly, "if
he's by way of being a friend of mine. I know a Henry Craven over in
England. Lives along the river, down Kingston way, in a big house."</p>
<p>"Called Uplands?"</p>
<p>"Yes, sir! That's the man. Little world, isn't it?"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>The man in the upper berth had to hold on as his curtains swung clear;
the man tilted back on the settee, all attention all the time, was more
than ever an effective foil to him. Without the kindly smile that went
as quickly as it came, Hilton Toye was somber, subtle and demure.
Cazalet, on the other hand, was of sanguine complexion and impetuous
looks. He was tanned a rich bronze about the middle of the face, but it
broke off across his forehead like the coloring of a meerschaum pipe.
Both men were in their early prime, and each stood roughly for his race
and type: the traveled American who knows the world, and the elemental
Britisher who has made some one loose end of it his own.</p>
<p>"I thought of my Henry Craven," continued Toye, "as soon as ever you
came out with yours. But it seemed a kind of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</SPAN></span> ordinary name. I might
have known it was the same if I'd recollected the name of his firm.
Isn't it Craven & Cazalet, the stockbrokers, down in Tokenhouse Yard?"</p>
<p>"That's it," said Cazalet bitterly. "But there have been none of us in
it since my father died ten years ago."</p>
<p>"But you're Henry Craven's old partner's son?"</p>
<p>"I'm his only son."</p>
<p>"Then no wonder you dream about Henry Craven," cried Toye, "and no
wonder it wouldn't break your heart if your dream came true."</p>
<p>"It wouldn't," said Cazalet through his teeth. "He wasn't a white man to
me or mine—whatever you may have found him."</p>
<p>"Oh! I don't claim to like him a lot," said Toye.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"But you seem to know a good deal about him?"</p>
<p>"I had a little place near his one summer. I know only what I heard down there."</p>
<p>"What did you hear?" asked Cazalet. "I've been away ten years, ever
since the crash that ruined everybody but the man at the bottom of the
whole thing. It would be a kindness to tell me what you heard."</p>
<p>"Well, I guess you've said it yourself right now. That man seems to have
beggared everybody all around except himself; that's how I make it out,"
said Hilton Toye.</p>
<p>"He did worse," said Cazalet through his teeth. "He killed my poor
father; he banished me to the wilds of Australia; and he sent a better
man than himself to prison for fourteen years!"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Toye opened his dark eyes for once. "Is that so? No. I never heard
that," said he.</p>
<p>"You hear it now. He did all that, indirectly, and I don't care who
hears me say so. I didn't realize it at the time. I was too young, and
the whole thing laid me out too flat; but I know it now, and I've known
it long enough. It was worse than a crash. It was a scandal. That was
what finished us off, all but Henry Craven! There'd been a gigantic
swindle—special investments recommended by the firm, bogus certificates
and all the rest of it. We were all to blame, of course. My poor father
ought never to have been a business man at all; he should have been a
poet. Even I—I was only a youngster in the office, but I ought to have
known what was going on. But Henry Craven <i>did</i> know. He was in it up to
the neck,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</SPAN></span> though a fellow called Scruton did the actual job. Scruton
got fourteen years—and Craven got our old house on the river!"</p>
<p>"And feathered it pretty well!" said Toye, nodding. "Yes, I did hear
that. And I can tell you they don't think any better of him, in the
neighborhood, for going to live right there. But how did he stop the
other man's mouth, and—how do you know?"</p>
<p>"Never mind how I know," said Cazalet. "Scruton was a friend of mine,
though an older man; he was good to me, though he was a wrong 'un
himself. He paid for it—paid for two—that I <i>can</i> say! But he was
engaged to Ethel Craven at the time, was going to be taken into
partnership on their marriage, and you can put two and two together for yourself."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"Did she wait for him?"</p>
<p>"About as long as you'd expect of the breed! She was her father's
daughter. I wonder you didn't come across her and her husband!"</p>
<p>"I didn't see so much of the Craven crowd," replied Hilton Toye. "I
wasn't stuck on them either. Say, Cazalet, I wouldn't be that old man
when Scruton comes out, would you?"</p>
<p>But Cazalet showed that he could hold his tongue when he liked, and his
grim look was not so legible as some that had come and gone before. This
one stuck until Toye produced a big flask from his grip, and the talk
shifted to less painful ground. It was the last night in the Bay of
Biscay, and Cazalet told how he had been in it a fortnight on his way
out by sailing-vessel. He even told it with considerable humor, and hit
off sundry <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</SPAN></span>passengers of ten years ago as though they had been aboard
the German boat that night; for he had gifts of anecdote and verbal
portraiture, and in their unpremeditated cups Toye drew him out about
the bush until the shadows passed for minutes from the red-brick face
with the white-brick forehead.</p>
<p>"I remember thinking I would dig for gold," said Cazalet. "That's all I
knew about Australia; that and bushrangers and dust-storms and
bush-fires! But you can have adventures of sorts if you go far enough
up-country for 'em; it still pays you to know how to use your fists out
there. I didn't, but I was picking it up before I'd been out three
months, and in six I was as ready as anybody to take off my coat. I
remember once at a bush shanty they dished up such fruity chops that I
said I'd fight the cook if they'd send<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</SPAN></span> <i>him</i> up; and I'm blowed if it
wasn't a fellow I'd been at school with and worshiped as no end of a
swell at games! Potts his name was, old Venus Potts, the best looking
chap in the school among other things; and there he was, cooking carrion
at twenty-five bob a week! Instead of fighting we joined forces, got a
burr-cutting job on a good station, then a better one over shearing, and
after that I wormed my way in as bookkeeper, and my pal became one of
the head overseers. Now we're our own bosses with a share in the show,
and the owner comes up only once a year to see how things are looking."</p>
<p>"I hope he had a daughter," said Toye, "and that you're going to marry
her, if you haven't yet?"</p>
<p>Cazalet laughed, but the shadow had returned. "No. I left that to my
pal," he said. "<i>He</i> did that all right!"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"Then I advise you to go and do likewise," rejoined his new friend with
a geniality impossible to take amiss. "I shouldn't wonder, now, if
there's some girl you left behind you."</p>
<p>Cazalet shook his head. "None who would look on herself in that light,"
he interrupted. It was all he said, but once more Toye was regarding him
as shrewdly as when the night was younger, and the littleness of the
world had not yet made them confidant and boon companion.</p>
<p>Eight bells actually struck before their great talk ended and Cazalet
swore that he missed the "watches aft, sir!" of the sailing-vessel ten
years before; and recalled how they had never changed watch without
putting the ship about, his last time in the bay.</p>
<p>"Say!" exclaimed Hilton Toye, knitting his brows over some nebulous
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</SPAN></span>recollection of his own. "I seem to have heard of you and some of your
yarns before. Didn't you spend nights in a log-hut miles and miles from
any other human being?"</p>
<p>It was as they were turning in at last, but the question spoiled a yawn for Cazalet.</p>
<p>"Sometimes, at one of our out-stations," said he, looking puzzled.</p>
<p>"I've seen your photograph," said Toye, regarding him with a more
critical stare. "But it was with a beard."</p>
<p>"I had it off when I was ashore the other day," said Cazalet. "I always
meant to, before the end of the voyage."</p>
<p>"I see. It was a Miss Macnair showed me that photograph—Miss Blanche
Macnair lives in a little house down there near your old home. I judge
hers is another old home that's been broken up since your day."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"They've all got married," said Cazalet.</p>
<p>"Except Miss Blanche. You write to her some, Mr. Cazalet?"</p>
<p>"Once a year—regularly. It was a promise. We were kids together," he
explained, as he climbed back into the upper berth.</p>
<p>"Guess you were a lucky kid," said the voice below. "She's one in a
thousand, Miss Blanche Macnair!"</p>
<hr />
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