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Page 72
"Knox! Knox!" came softly from the opening in the box hedge, "what the
devil are you about?"
It was Paul Harley returned from his tour of the building.
"Harley!" I whispered, descending, "quick! the Colonel has just gone
into the Tudor garden!"
"What!" There was a note of absolute horror in the exclamation. "You
should have stopped him, Knox, you should have stopped him!" cried
Harley, and with that he ran off in the same direction.
Disentangling my foot from the rungs of the ladder which lay upon the
ground, I was about to follow, when it happened--that strange and
ghastly thing toward which, secretly, darkly, events had been tending.
The crack of a rifle sounded sharply in the stillness, echoing and re-
echoing from wing to wing of Cray's Folly and then, more dimly, up the
wooded slopes beyond! Somewhere ahead of me I heard Harley cry out:
"My God, I am too late! They have got him!"
Then, hotfoot, I was making for the entrance to the garden. Just as I
came to it and raced down the steps I heard another sound the memory of
which haunts me to this day.
Where it came from I had no idea. Perhaps I was too confused to judge
accurately. It might have come from the house, or from the slopes
beyond the house, But it was a sort of shrill, choking laugh, and it
set the ultimate touch of horror upon a _sc�ne macabre_ which, even as
I write of it, seems unreal to me.
I ran up the path to where Harley was kneeling beside the sun-dial.
Analysis of my emotions at this moment were futile; I can only say that
I had come to a state of stupefaction. Face downward on the grass, arms
outstretched and fists clenched, lay Colonel Menendez. I think I saw
him move convulsively, but as I gained his side Harley looked up at me,
and beneath the tan which he never lost his face had grown pale. He
spoke through clenched teeth.
"Merciful God," he said, "he is shot through the head."
One glance I gave at the ghastly wound in the base of the Colonel's
skull, and then swayed backward in a sort of nausea. To see a man die
in the heat of battle, a man one has known and called friend, is
strange and terrible. Here in this moon-bathed Tudor garden it was a
horror almost beyond my powers to endure.
Paul Harley, without touching the prone figure, stood up. Indeed no
examination of the victim was necessary. A rifle bullet had pierced his
brain, and he lay there dead with his head toward the hills.
I clutched at Harley's shoulder, but he stood rigidly, staring up the
slope past the angle of the tower, to where a gable of the Guest House
jutted out from the trees.
"Did you hear--that cry?" I whispered, "immediately after the shot?"
"I heard it."
A moment longer he stood fixedly watching, and then:
"Not a wisp of smoke," he said. "You note the direction in which he was
facing when he fell?"
He spoke in a stern and unnatural voice.
"I do. He must have turned half right when he came to the sun-dial."
"Where were you when the shot was fired?"
"Running in this direction."
"You saw no flash?"
"None."
"Neither did I," groaned Harley; "neither did I. And short of throwing
a cordon round the hills what can be done? How can I move?"
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