he walked into the hall at the beginning of the song. [Pg 60] The sound we had heard, so sharp and clear out of the night, so penetrating above the mock-ferocious words of the song, was utterly beyond the ken of all of us. It was a living voice; beyond that no definite analysis could be made. Sounds do not imprint themselves so deeply upon the memory as do visual images, yet the remembrance of it, in all its overtones and gradations, is still inordinately vivid; and I have no doubt but that such is the case with every man that heard it. It was a high, rather sharp, full-lunged utterance, not in the least subdued. It had the unrestrained, unguarded tone of an instinctive utterance, rather than a conscious one—a cry that leaped to the lips in some great extremity or crisis. Yet it went further. Every man of us that heard it felt instinctively that its tone was of fear and agony unimagined, beyond the pale of our ordered lives. “My God, what’s that?” Van Hope asked. Van Hope was the type of man that yields quickly to his impulses. None of us answered him for a moment. Then Nealman turned, rather slowly. “It [Pg 61]sounded like the devil, didn’t it?” he said. “But it likely wasn’t anything. I’ve heard some devilish cries in the couple of weeks I’ve been here—bitterns and owls and things like that. Might have been a panther in the woods.” [Pg 61] Marten smiled slowly, rather contemptuously. “You’ll have to do better than that, Nealman. That wasn’t a panther. Also—it wasn’t an owl. We’d better investigate.” “Yes—I think we had better. But you don’t know what hellish sounds some of these swamp-creatures can make. We’ll all be laughing in a minute.” His tone was rather ragged, for all his reassuring words, and we knew he was as shaken as the rest of us. A door opened into the hall—evidently some of the other guests were already seeking the explanation of that fearful sound. It seemed to all of us that 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 [Pg 62]glint of the
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