hat hardly an instant had elapsed since the
sound. Indeed it still rang in our ears. All that had been said had
scarcely taken a breath. We rushed out, seemingly at once, into the
velvet darkness. The moon was incredibly vivid in the sky.

We passed into a rose-garden, under great, arching trees, and now we
could see the silver glint of the moon on the lagoon. The tide was
going out and the waters lay like glass.

Through the rifts in the trees we could see further--the stretching
sands, gray in the moonlight, the blue-black mysterious seas beyond.
What forms the crags took, in that eerie light! There was little of
reality left about them.

We heard some one pushing through the shrubbery ahead of us, and he
stopped for us to come up. I recognized the dark beard and mustache of
Pescini. "What was it?" he asked. Excitement had brought out a
deep-buried accent, native to some South European land. "Was it further
on?"

"I think so," Nealman answered. "Down by the lagoon."

He joined us, and we pushed on, but we spread out as we neared the shore
of the lagoon. Some one's shadow whipped by me, and I turned to find
Major Dell.

The man was severely shaken. "My God, wasn't that awful!" he exclaimed.
"Who is it--you, Killdare?" He stared into my face, and his own looked
white and masque-like in the moonlight. Then all of us began to search,
up and down the shore of the lagoon.

In the moonlight our shadows leaped, met one another, blended and raced
away; and our voices rang strangely as we called back and forth. But
the search was not long. Van Hope suddenly exclaimed sharply--an audible
inhalation of breath, rather than an oath--and we saw him bending over,
only his head and shoulders revealed in the moonlight. He stood just
beside the craggy margin of the lagoon.

"What is it?" some one asked him, out of the gloom.

"Come here and see," Van Hope replied--rather quietly, I thought. In a
moment we had formed a little circle.

A dead man lay at our feet, mostly obscured in the shadow of the crags
of the lagoon. We simply stood in silence, looking down. We knew that he
was dead just as surely as we knew that we ourselves were living men. It
was not that the light was good; that there was scarcely any light at
all. We knew it, I suppose, from the huddled position of his form.

Joe Nopp scratched a match. He held it perfectly steadily. The first
thing it showed to me was a gray face and gray hair, and a stain that
was