ached my ears; but now,
almost holding my breath in that sort of nervous tensity peculiar to one
aroused thus, I listened, and the silence seemed complete. Perhaps I had
been dreaming...

"Help! Petrie! Help!..."

It was Nayland Smith in the room above me!

My doubts were dissolved; this was no trick of an imagination
disordered. Some dreadful menace threatened my friend. Not delaying
even to snatch my dressing-gown, I rushed out on to the landing, up the
stairs, bare-footed 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
gray 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withdrawn, snakelike, from the room, through the open window...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 leaped
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 gray 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 onto 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 sunbaked as t