audible grinding noise as the second man worked. Eaton halted
again and waited; if there were two, there might be others.

The discovery of the second man had not made Eaton afraid; his pulses
were beating faster and hotter, and he felt the blood rushing to his
head and his hands growing cold with his excitement; but he was
conscious of no fear. He crouched and crept forward noiselessly again.
No other light appeared in the room, and there was no sound elsewhere
from the darkness; but the man who supervised had moved closer to the
other. The grinding noise had stopped; it was followed by a sharp
click; the men, side by side, were bending over something; and the
light of the man who had been working, for a fraction of a second shot
into the face of the other. It did not delay at all; it was a purely
accidental flash and could not have been said to show the features at
all--only a posture, an expression, a personality of a strong and cruel
man. He muttered some short, hoarse imprecation at the other; but
before Eaton heard the voice, he had stopped as if struck, and his
breath had gone from him.

His instant's glimpse of that face astounded, stunned, stupefied him.
He could not have seen that man! The fact was impossible! He must
have been mad; his mind must have become unreliable to let him even
imagine it. Then came the sound of the voice--the voice of the man
whose face he had seen! It was he! And, in place of the paralysis of
the first instant, now a wild, savage throe of passion seized Eaton;
his pulses leaped so it seemed they must burst his veins, and he gulped
and choked. He had not filled in with insane fancy the features of the
man whom he had seen; the voice witnessed too that the man in the dark
by the wall was he whom Eaton--if he could have dreamed such a fact as
now had been disclosed--would have circled the world to catch and
destroy; yet now with the destruction of that man in his power--for he
had but to aim and empty his automatic pistol at five paces--such
destruction at this moment could not suffice; mere shooting that man
would be petty, ineffectual. Eaton's fingers tightened on the handle
of his pistol, but he held it now not as a weapon to fire but as a dull
weight with which to strike. The grip of his left hand clamped onto
the short steel bar, and with lips parted--breathing once, it seemed,
for each heartbeat and yet choking, suffocating--he leaped forward.

At the same instant--s