moon on the lagoon. The tide was going out and the waters lay like glass.

[Pg 62]

Through the rifts in the trees we could see further—the stretching sands, gray in the moonlight, the blue-black mysterious seas beyond. What forms the crags took, in that eerie light! There was little of reality left about them.

We heard some one pushing through the shrubbery ahead of us, and he stopped for us to come up. I recognized the dark beard and mustache of Pescini. “What was it?” he asked. Excitement had brought out a deep-buried accent, native to some South European land. “Was it further on?”

“I think so,” Nealman answered. “Down by the lagoon.”

He joined us, and we pushed on, but we spread out as we neared the shore of the lagoon. Some one’s shadow whipped by me, and I turned to find Major Dell.

The man was severely shaken. “My God, wasn’t that awful!” he exclaimed. “Who is it—you, Killdare?” He stared into my face, and his own looked white and masque-like in the moonlight. Then all of us began to search, up and down the shore of the lagoon.

In the moonlight our shadows leaped, met one another, blended and raced away; and our [Pg 63]voices rang strangely as we called back and forth. But the search was not long. Van Hope suddenly exclaimed sharply—an audible inhalation of breath, rather than an oath—and we saw him bending over, only his head and shoulders revealed in the moonlight. He stood just beside the craggy margin of the lagoon.

[Pg 63]

“What is it?” some one asked him, out of the gloom.

“Come here and see,” Van Hope replied—rather quietly, I thought. In a moment we had formed a little circle.

A dead man lay at our feet, mostly obscured in the shadow of the crags of the lagoon. We simply stood in silence, looking down. We knew that he was dead just as surely as we knew that we ourselves were living men. It was not that the light was good; that there was scarcely any light at all. We knew it, I suppose, from the huddled position of his form.

Joe Nopp scratched a match. He held it perfectly steadily. The first thing it showed to me was a gray face and gray hair, and a stain that was not gray, but rather ominously dark, on the torn, white front of the man’s evening shirt. Nealman 

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