moment of wakening is unable to adjust himself to his environment. While he groped his way through the tangled underbrush his memory struggled to clear a passage back to the present.

At the foot of the cliff he stopped short, staring in horror at a spot a few paces ahead of him. A scrub madrone had been torn from the side of the ravine and had fallen to the bottom of the cañon, its mutilated roots stretching skyward like the grotesque claws of some prehistoric animal. The force which had torn it from its moorings had scarred the slope with other evidences of disaster; a limb lopped off here, a mass of brush ripped away there. A glistening object caught his eye. He stooped laboriously and picked it up, then dropped it, shuddering. It was a triangle of broken glass spattered with blood.

For half an hour he poked around in the brush searching for, yet dreading to find, a more gruesome object. Perhaps the driver had not been killed after all, he reassured himself. As he dimly remembered him, he was a friendly sort of fellow whom he had engaged to drive him out to the Raeburn place. As he climbed the steep hill now Kenwick tried to remember what they had been talking about just before this thing happened, but the effort made his head ache and landed him nowhere. A more vital conjecture was concerned with how long he had been lying at the foot of the ravine and why no one had come to his rescue.

When he gained the road there was nobody in sight. It was a splendidly paved bit of country boulevard curving out of sight into what Kenwick told himself must be the land of dreams and romance. He turned to the left and started to walk, aimlessly, hopping part of the time to save his aching leg. Surely some one would overtake him in a car soon and offer assistance. He had dragged himself over half a mile, stimulated by this hope, when he sighted a house set far back from the highway behind a vista of date-palms. He struggled up to the entrance and gazed through the bars of a tall iron gate. It was locked. And, as an extra precaution against intrusion, a heavy iron chain was swung across the outside. Through the trees the house was plainly visible, a colossal concrete structure with stone trimmings flanked on one side by a sturdy combination tank-house and garage. About the whole place there was an aristocratic, exclusive dignity that reminded Kenwick of one of the great English estates that he had once visited during a convalescent furlough spent near London. It was more like a castle than a private residence, with its high stone wall covered by dank clinging vines. The very trees that bordered the driveway had an air of 

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