lt as a voyager might who awakened on a planet not his own and at
midnight saw the faint star where once he lived. As yet the wonder
numbed. The complete cessation of anger, too, was confusing. There was
only the plane of existence, grey and featureless. This lasted some
moments, then the lights began to play.

He rose from the stone and, going to the water's edge, knelt and tried
to wash the blood from his sleeve, but without success. He stood up with
a frown. The clouds were high above the treetops, though the sun yet
shone. At a little distance Selim was quietly grazing, the birds had
returned to their song, the squirrels to their play along the leafy
boughs. Rand looked at his watch. "Twelve o'clock--twelve o'clock."
Suddenly a thought struck him. "The pistol, with my name engraved on
it--"

He had flung the weapon far into the water. The stream was hardly more
than a wide brook, but its bed was broken, and above and below the
little ford the water fell over ledges into small, deep pools. Where had
the pistol fallen? If into one of these, he could not find it again. He
had no time to sound them one by one. He moved along the bank, his keen
eyes searching the water. The pistol was nowhere visible; it must have
gone into midstream, into a pool below a cascade. If so, it might lie
there, undiscovered, a thousand years. He stood irresolute. Could he
have done so, he would have dragged the stream, but there was now no
time to squander. Once more he made certain that it lay nowhere in clear
water or near the shore, then abruptly left the search.

He stood in thought for another moment, then with deliberation moved to
his victim's side and looked down upon him with a face almost as blank
and still as the dead man's own. Presently he spoke: "Good-bye, Cary."
The sound of his own voice, strained and strange, hardly raised above a
whisper and yet, in the silence of this new world, more loud than
thunder, broke the spell. He uttered a strangled cry, dashed up the
strand to the grazing horse, flung himself into the saddle, and applied
the spur.

He and Selim did not cross the stream. His mind worked automatically,
but it was a trained mind, and knew what the emergency demanded. He
retraced the river road to a point beyond the rock and the mountain ash,
and there left it. Once in the burned herbage under the trees, he looked
back to the road. There was rock and there was black leaf-mould. If in
the latter any hoof-prints sho