ence of the windless night.

I saw Holmes put his hand to his forehead like a man distracted.
He stamped his feet upon the ground.

"He has beaten us, Watson. We are too late."

"No, no, surely not!"

"Fool that I was to hold my hand. And you, Watson, see what comes
of abandoning your charge! But, by Heaven, if the worst has
happened, we'll avenge him!"

Blindly we ran through the gloom, blundering against boulders,
forcing our way through gorse bushes, panting up hills and
rushing down slopes, heading always in the direction whence those
dreadful sounds had come. At every rise Holmes looked eagerly
round him, but the shadows were thick upon the moor, and nothing
moved upon its dreary face.

"Can you see anything?"

"Nothing."

"But, hark, what is that?"

A low moan had fallen upon our ears. There it was again upon our
left! On that side a ridge of rocks ended in a sheer cliff which
overlooked a stone-strewn slope. On its jagged face was
spread-eagled some dark, irregular object. As we ran towards it
the vague outline hardened into a definite shape. It was a
prostrate man face downward upon the ground, the head doubled
under him at a horrible angle, the shoulders rounded and the body
hunched together as if in the act of throwing a somersault. So
grotesque was the attitude that I could not for the instant
realize that that moan had been the passing of his soul. Not a
whisper, not a rustle, rose now from the dark figure over which
we stooped. Holmes laid his hand upon him, and held it up again,
with an exclamation of horror. The gleam of the match which he
struck shone upon his clotted fingers and upon the ghastly pool
which widened slowly from the crushed skull of the victim. And it
shone upon something else which turned our hearts sick and faint
within us--the body of Sir Henry Baskerville!

There was no chance of either of us forgetting that peculiar
ruddy tweed suit--the very one which he had worn on the first
morning that we had seen him in Baker Street. We caught the one
clear glimpse of it, and then the match flickered and went out,
even as the hope had gone out of our souls. Holmes groaned, and
his face glimmered white through the darkness.

"The brute! the brute!" I cried with clenched hands. "Oh Holmes,
I shall never forgive myself for having left him to his fate."

"I am more to blame than you, Watson. In order to have my case
well rounded and complete, I have thrown away the life of my
clien