bout town, and we've done well to lay hands on him in the time."

"You will do better still when you do lay hands on him," said I,
wresting my eyes from the yellow dead face of the foreign scoundrel.
The moon shone full upon his high forehead, his shrivelled lips, dank in
their death agony, and on the bauble with the sacred device that he wore
always in his tie. I recovered my property from the shrunken fingers,
and so turned away with a harder heart than I ever had before or since
for any creature of Almighty God.

Harris had expired in our absence.

"Never spoke, sir," said the constable in whose arms we had left him.

"More's the pity. Well, cut out at the back and help land the young
gent, or we'll have him giving us the slip too. He may double back,
but I'm watching out for that. Which way should you say he'd head, Mr.
Cole?"

"Inland," said I, lying on the spur of the moment, I knew not why. "Try
at the cottage where I've been staying."

"We have a man posted there already. That woman is one of the gang,
and we've got her safe. But I'll take your advice, and have that side
scoured whilst I hang about the place."

And he walked through the house, and out the back way, at the officer's
heels; meanwhile the man with the wounded arm was swaying where he sat
from loss of blood, and I had to help him into the open air before at
last I was free to return to poor Eva in her place of loathsome safety.

I had been so long, however, that her patience was exhausted, and as I
returned to the library by one door, she entered by the other.

"I could bear it no longer. Tell me--the worst!"

"Three of them are dead."

"Which three?"

She had crossed to the other door, and would not have me shut it. So
I stood between her and the hearth, on which lay the captain's corpse,
with the hearthrug turned up on either side to cover it.

"Harris for one," said I. "Outside lie Jose and--"

"Quick! Quick!"

"Senhor Santos."

Her face was as though the name meant nothing to her.

"And Mr. Rattray?" she cried. "And Mr. Rattray--"

"Has escaped for the present. He seems to have cut his way through the
police and got over the wall by a ladder they left behind them. They are
scouring the country--Miss Denison! Eva! My poor love!"

She had broken down utterly in a second fit of violent weeping; and a
second time I took her in my arms, and stood trying in my clumsy way to
comfort her, as though she were a little child. A lamp