the four of us raced down the driveway.

Instinctively we went first to the place on the shore where Florey had
been slain the night before. The action was a clear indication of what
was in our minds--that this matter was in some way darkly related to the
crime of the night before. But the sand was bare, and the grass
unshadowed in the moonlight.

For a moment we stood, aghast and shaken, gazing out over the lagoon. It
was still as glass. The tide was running out, and not a wave stirred in
all its darkened expanse. We saw the image of the moon far out, scarcely
wavering, and the long, bright trail that it made across the water to
our eyes. The night was still stifling hot, and the lagoon conveyed an
image of coolness.

"Don't stand here!" Fargo cried. "We've got to make a search. Some poor
devil is likely lying somewhere in these gardens----"

The house was lighted now, and in an uproar, and some of the other
guests were racing down the driveway to us. In this regard it might have
been last night's tragedy reenacted. There was, however, one significant
change.

The iron self-control, the coolness, the perfect discipline of mind and
muscle that had marked the finding of the dead body on the shore the
preceding night was no longer entirely manifest. These northern men,
cold as flint ordinarily, were no longer wholly self-mastered. One
glance at their faces, loose and pale in the moonlight, and the first
sound of their voices told this fact only too plainly. It was not,
however, that they were completely broken. Their training and their
manhood was too good for that.

We didn't stop to answer their queries. We began to search through the
gardens, examining every shadow, peering into every covert. We tried to
direct each other according to our several ideas as to the source of the
sound. We all agreed, however, that the sound had seemed to come from
the immediate vicinity of the natural rock wall that formed the lagoon.

The next few moments were not very coherent. We called back and forth,
encountered one another in the shadows, knew moments of apprehension
when the brush walls cut us off from our fellows, but we found nothing
that might have explained that desperate cry of a few moments before. At
last some one called out commandingly from the shores of the lagoon.

"Come here, every one," he said. The voice rose above our confused
utterances, and all of us, recognizing a leader, hurried to him. Pescini
was stan