d as I was, threw open the door of Smith's room
and literally hurled myself in.

Those cries had been the cries of one assailed, had been uttered, I
judged, in the brief interval of a life and death struggle; had been
choked off....

A certain amount of moonlight found access to the room, without
spreading so far as the bed in which my friend lay. But at the moment
of my headlong entrance, and before I had switched on the light, my
gaze automatically was directed to the pale moonbeam streaming through
the window and down on to one corner of the sheep skin rug beside the
bed.

There came a sound of faint and muffled coughing,

What with my recent awakening and the panic at my heart, I could not
claim that my vision was true; but across this moonbeam passed a sort
of grey streak, for all the world as though some long thin shape had
been withdrawn, snakelike, from the room, through the open window....
From somewhere outside the house, and below, I heard the cough again,
followed by a sharp cracking sound like the lashing of a whip.

I depressed the switch, flooding the room with light, and as I leapt
forward to the bed a word picture of what I had seen formed in my
mind; and I found that I was thinking of a grey feather boa.

"Smith!" I cried (my voice seemed to pitch itself, unwilled, in a very
high key), "Smith, old man!"

He made no reply, and a sudden, sorrowful fear clutched at my
heart-strings. He was lying half out of bed flat upon his back, his
head at a dreadful angle with his body. As I bent over him and seized
him by the shoulders, I could see the whites of his eyes. His arms
hung limply, and his fingers touched the carpet.

"My God!" I whispered, "what has happened?"

I heaved him back on to the pillow, and looked anxiously into his
face. Habitually gaunt, the flesh so refined away by the consuming
nervous energy of the man as to reveal the cheekbones in sharp
prominence, he now looked truly ghastly. His skin was so sun-baked as
to have changed constitutionally; nothing could ever eradicate that
tan. But to-night a fearful greyness was mingled with the brown, his
lips were purple ... and there were marks of strangulation upon the
lean throat--ever darkening weals of clutching fingers.

He began to breathe stertorously and convulsively, inhalation being
accompanied by a significant gurgle in the throat. But now my calm was
restored in face of a situation which called for professional
attention.

I