libly on my
mind. Marten paused, his lips half open, a strange, blank look of
amazement on his face. Nealman stared at me like a witless man, but I
saw by his look that he was groping for an explanation. Van Hope stood
peculiarly braced, his heavy hands open, beads of perspiration on his
temples. Whether Pescini was still with us I do not know. I tried to
remember later, but without ever coming to a conclusion. He had been
standing behind me, at first, so I couldn't have seen him anyway. I
believed, however, without knowing why, that he walked into the hall at
the beginning of the song.

The sound we had heard, so sharp and clear out of the night, so
penetrating above the mock-ferocious words of the song, was utterly
beyond the ken of all of us. It was a living voice; beyond that no
definite analysis could be made. Sounds do not imprint themselves so
deeply upon the memory as do visual images, yet the remembrance of it,
in all its overtones and gradations, is still inordinately vivid; and I
have no doubt but that such is the case with every man that heard it.

It was a high, rather sharp, full-lunged utterance, not in the least
subdued. It had the unrestrained, unguarded tone of an instinctive
utterance, rather than a conscious one--a cry that leaped to the lips in
some great extremity or crisis. Yet it went further. Every man of us
that heard it felt instinctively that its tone was of fear and agony
unimagined, beyond the pale of our ordered lives.

"My God, what's that?" Van Hope asked. Van Hope was the type of man that
yields quickly to his impulses.

None of us answered him for a moment. Then Nealman turned, rather
slowly. "It sounded like the devil, didn't it?" he said. "But it likely
wasn't anything. I've heard some devilish cries in the couple of weeks
I've been here--bitterns and owls and things like that. Might have been
a panther in the woods."

Marten smiled slowly, rather contemptuously. "You'll have to do better
than that, Nealman. That wasn't a panther. Also--it wasn't an owl. We'd
better investigate."

"Yes--I think we had better. But you don't know what hellish sounds some
of these swamp-creatures can make. We'll all be laughing in a minute."

His tone was rather ragged, for all his reassuring words, and we knew he
was as shaken as the rest of us. A door opened into the hall--evidently
some of the other guests were already seeking the explanation of that
fearful sound.

It seemed to all of us t