"It was the wing of a bat!

"I am perhaps a hasty man. It is in my blood. I tore the unclean thing
from the panel and stamped it under my feet. No one of the servants who
had drawn my attention to its presence would consent to touch it.
Indeed, they all shrank from me as though I, too, were unclean. I
endeavoured to forget it. Who was I to be influenced by the threats of
natives?

"That night, just at the hour of sunset, a shot was fired at me from a
neighbouring clump of trees, only missing me I think by the fraction of
an inch. I realized that the peril was real, and was one against which
I could not fight.

"Permit me to be brief, gentlemen. Six attempts of various kinds were
made upon my life in Cuba. I crossed to the United States. In
Washington, the political capital of the country, an assassin gained
access to my hotel apartment and but for the fact that a friend chanced
to call me up on the telephone at that late hour of the night, thereby
awakening me, I should have received a knife in my heart. I saw the
knife in the dim light; I saw the shadowy figure. I leapt out on the
opposite side of the bed, seized a table-lamp which stood there, and
hurled it at my assailant.

"There was a crash, a stifled exclamation, shuffling, the door opened,
and my would-be assassin was gone. But I had learned something, and to
my old fears a new one was added."

"What had you learned?" asked Harley, whose interest in the narrative