"Oh no," the stranger answered, "that was only the beginning of the conclusion. I didn't go to sleep at once, though I felt so much at peace. In fact, Melford beat me, and I could hear him far in advance, steaming and whistling away, in a style that I recalled as characteristic, over a space of intervening years that I hadn't definitely summed up yet. It made me think of a night near Narragansett Bay, where two friends of mine and I had had a mighty good dinner at a sort of wild club-house, and had hurried into our bunks, each one so as to get the start of the others, for the fellows that were left behind knew they had no chance of sleep after the first began to get in his work. I laughed, and I suppose I must have gone to sleep almost simultaneously, for I don't recollect anything afterwards till I was wakened by a kind of muffled bellow, that I remembered only too well. It was the unfailing sign of Melford's nightmare. "I was ready to swear, and I was ashamed for the fellow who had no more self-control than that: when a fellow snores, or has a nightmare, you always think first off that he needn't have had it if he had tried. As usual, I knew Melford didn't know what his nightmare was about, and that made me madder still, to have him bellowing into the air like that, with no particular aim. All at once there came a piercing scream from the stateroom, and then I knew that the girl there had heard Melford and been scared out of a year's growth." The stranger made a little break, and Wanhope asked, "Could you make out what she screamed, or was it quite inarticulate?" "It was plain enough, and it gave me a clew, somehow, to what Melford's nightmare was about. She was calling out, 'Help! help! help! Burglars!' till I thought she would raise the roof of the car." "And did she wake anybody?" Rulledge inquired.