ay down the hill when with a crack the heavens opened and the
white jagged lightning fairly hissed by him. Crack followed crack,
flash and peal together, or so quick on each other, that no mortal
could distinguish the rattle of one discharge from the bursting
explosion of the other. No such tempest, he decided, could last for
long, and he fled down to the Ring of Bells for shelter until the
worst should be over. He waited there perhaps twenty minutes, and
still the infernal din grew worse instead of better, until his anxiety
for the old man forced him out in the teeth of it and up the hill,
where the gutters had overflowed upon the roadway, and the waters
raced over his ankles. The first thing he saw at the top in one lurid
instant was the entire Jago family gathered by their garden gate--six
of them--and all bareheaded under the deluge.

The next flash revealed why they were there. Against the round-house
opposite a ladder rested, and above it on the steep roof clung a
man--his father. He had clamped his small ladder into the thatch, and
as the heaven opened and shut, now silhouetting the round-house, now
wrapping it in white flames--they saw him climbing up, and still up,
towards the cross at the top.

"Help, there!" shouted the Stranger. "Come down! O help, you!--we must
get him down!" The women and children screamed. A fresh explosion
drowned shout and screams.

Jago and the Stranger reached the ladder together. The Stranger
mounted first; but as he did so, the watchers in one blinding moment
saw the old Thatcher's hand go up and grip the cross. The shutters of
darkness came to with a roar, but above it rose a shrill, a terribly
human cry.

"Dave!" cried the voice. "Ted!"

Silence followed, and then a heavy thud. They waited for the next
flash. It came. There was no one on the roof of the round-house, but a
broken stump where the cross had been.

V

This was the story the yellow Stranger told to the Coroner. And the
Coroner listened and asked:

"Can you account for conduct of deceased? Had he been drinking that
evening?"

"He had," answered the witness, and for a moment, while the Coroner
took a note, it seemed he had said all. Then he seemed to think better
of it, and added "My father suffered from delusions sir."

"Hey? What sort of delusions?" The Coroner glanced at the jury, who
sat impassive.

"Well, sir, my father in his young days had served as a soldier."

Here the jurymen began to show in