ld a heavy walking cane. I knew the handle to
be leaded, and I could judge of the force with which he wielded it by
the fact that it cut the air with a keen swishing sound. It descended
upon the back of the mulatto's skull with a sickening thud, and the
great brown body dropped inert upon the padded bed--in which not Smith,
but his grip, reposed. There was no word, no cry. Then:

"Shoot, Petrie! Shoot the fiend! Shoot..."

Van Roon, dropping the candle, in the falling gleam of which I saw the
whites of the oblique eyes turned and leaped from the room with the
agility of a wild cat. The ensuing darkness was split by a streak of
lightning... and there was Nayland Smith scrambling around the foot of
the bed and making for the door in hot pursuit.

We gained it almost together. Smith had dropped the cane, and now
held his pistol in his hand. Together we fired into the chasm of the
corridor, and in the flash, saw Van Roon hurling himself down the
stairs. He went silently in his stockinged feet, and our own clatter
was drowned by the awful booming of the thunder which now burst over us
again.

Crack!--crack!--crack! Three times our pistols spat venomously after
the flying figure... then we had crossed the hall below and were in
the wilderness of the night with the rain descending upon us in sheets.
Vaguely I saw the white shirt-sleeves of the fugitive near the corner
of the stone fence. A moment he hesitated, then darted away inland, not
toward Saul, but toward the moor and the cup of the inland bay.

"Steady, Petrie! steady!" cried Nayland Smith. He ran, panting, beside
me. "It is the path to the mire." He breathed sibilantly between every
few words. "It was out there... that he hoped to lure us... with the cry
for help."

A great blaze of lightning illuminated the landscape as far as the eye
could see. Ahead of us a flying shape, hair lank and glistening in the
downpour, followed a faint path skirting that green tongue of morass
which we had noted from the upland. It was Kegan Van Roon. He glanced
over his shoulder, showing a yellow, terror-stricken face. We were
gaining upon him. Darkness fell, and the thunder cracked and boomed as
though the very moor were splitting about us.

"Another fifty yards, Petrie," breathed Nayland Smith, "and after that
it's unchartered ground."

On we went through the rain and the darkness; then:

"Slow up! slow up!" cried Smith. "It feels soft!"

Indeed, already I had made one fals