galley with decorative waves beneath it, but interrupted in the middle
by a curious jagged rock, which was either a fault in the wood or
some conventional representation of the water coming in. The third
represented the upper half of a human figure, ending in an escalloped
line like the waves; the face was rubbed and featureless, and both arms
were held very stiffly up in the air.

"Well," muttered Father Brown, blinking, "here is the legend of the
Spaniard plain enough. Here he is holding up his arms and cursing in the
sea; and here are the two curses: the wrecked ship and the burning of
Pendragon Tower."

Pendragon shook his head with a kind of venerable amusement. "And how
many other things might it not be?" he said. "Don't you know that that
sort of half-man, like a half-lion or half-stag, is quite common
in heraldry? Might not that line through the ship be one of those
parti-per-pale lines, indented, I think they call it? And though the
third thing isn't so very heraldic, it would be more heraldic to suppose
it a tower crowned with laurel than with fire; and it looks just as like
it."

"But it seems rather odd," said Flambeau, "that it should exactly
confirm the old legend."

"Ah," replied the sceptical traveller, "but you don't know how much of
the old legend may have been made up from the old figures. Besides, it
isn't the only old legend. Fanshaw, here, who is fond of such things,
will tell you there are other versions of the tale, and much more
horrible ones. One story credits my unfortunate ancestor with having
had the Spaniard cut in two; and that will fit the pretty picture also.
Another obligingly credits our family with the possession of a tower
full of snakes and explains those little, wriggly things in that
way. And a third theory supposes the crooked line on the ship to be a
conventionalized thunderbolt; but that alone, if seriously examined,
would show what a very little way these unhappy coincidences really go."

"Why, how do you mean?" asked Fanshaw.

"It so happens," replied his host coolly, "that there was no thunder
and lightning at all in the two or three shipwrecks I know of in our
family."

"Oh!" said Father Brown, and jumped down from the little table.

There was another silence in which they heard the continuous murmur of
the river; then Fanshaw said, in a doubtful and perhaps disappointed
tone: "Then you don't think there is anything in the tales of the tower
in flames?"

"There