ddly up and down, "is he
all right?"

"Seems so," said the officer huskily, bending over the obscure and
decaying skeleton in the box. "Wait a minute."

A vast heave went over Flambeau's huge figure. "And now I come to think
of it," he cried, "why in the name of madness shouldn't he be all right?
What is it gets hold of a man on these cursed cold mountains? I think
it's the black, brainless repetition; all these forests, and over all
an ancient horror of unconsciousness. It's like the dream of an atheist.
Pine-trees and more pine-trees and millions more pine-trees--"

"God!" cried the man by the coffin, "but he hasn't got a head."

While the others stood rigid the priest, for the first time, showed a
leap of startled concern.

"No head!" he repeated. "No head?" as if he had almost expected some
other deficiency.

Half-witted visions of a headless baby born to Glengyle, of a headless
youth hiding himself in the castle, of a headless man pacing those
ancient halls or that gorgeous garden, passed in panorama through their
minds. But even in that stiffened instant the tale took no root in them
and seemed to have no reason in it. They stood listening to the loud
woods and the shrieking sky quite foolishly, like exhausted animals.
Thought seemed to be something enormous that had suddenly slipped out of
their grasp.

"There are three headless men," said Father Brown, "standing round this
open grave."

The pale detective from London opened his mouth to speak, and left it
open like a yokel, while a long scream of wind tore the sky; then he
looked at the axe in his hands as if it did not belong to him, and
dropped it.

"Father," said Flambeau in that infantile and heavy voice he used very
seldom, "what are we to do?"

His friend's reply came with the pent promptitude of a gun going off.

"Sleep!" cried Father Brown. "Sleep. We have come to the end of the
ways. Do you know what sleep is? Do you know that every man who sleeps
believes in God? It is a sacrament; for it is an act of faith and it is
a food. And we need a sacrament, if only a natural one. Something has
fallen on us that falls very seldom on men; perhaps the worst thing that
can fall on them."

Craven's parted lips came together to say, "What do you mean?"

The priest had turned his face to the castle as he answered: "We have
found the truth; and the truth makes no sense."

He went down the path in front of them with a plunging and reckless
step very