ht
but calling to one another in the woods. All at once he recoiled,
throwing himself down again upon the ground. The clump of bushes
hiding him ended abruptly only a few yards away; through their bare
twigs, but far below him, the sunlight twinkled, mockingly, at him from
the surface of water. It was the lake!

Eaton crept forward to the edge of the steep bluff, following the
tracks. He peered over the edge. The tracks did not stop at the edge
of the bluff; they went on down it. The steep sandy precipice was
scarred where the men, still bearing their burden, had slipped and
scrambled down it. The marks crossed the shingle sixty feet below;
they were deeply printed in the wet sand down to the water's very edge.
There they stopped.

Eaton had not expected this. He stared, worn out and with his senses
in confusion, and overcome by his physical weakness. The sunlit water
only seemed to mock and laugh at him--blue, rippling under the breeze
and bearing no trail. It was quite plain what had occurred; the wet
sand below was trampled by the feet of three or four men and cut by a
boat's bow. They had taken the body away with them in the boat. To
sink it somewhere weighted with heavy stones in the deep water? Or had
it been carried away on that small, swift vessel Eaton had seen from
Santoine's lawn? In either case, Eaton's search was hopeless now.

But it could not be so; it must not be so! Eaton's eyes searched
feverishly the shore and the lake. But there was nothing in sight upon
either. He crept back from the edge of the bluff, hiding beside a
fallen log banked with dead leaves. What was it he had said to
Harriet? "I will come back to you--as you have never known me before!"
He rehearsed the words in mockery. How would he return to her now? As
he moved, a fierce, hot pain from the clotted wound in his shoulder
shot him through and through with agony and the silence and darkness of
unconsciousness overwhelmed him.

CHAPTER XXIII

NOT EATON--OVERTON

Santoine awoke at five o'clock. The messenger whom he had despatched a
few hours earlier had not yet returned. The blind man felt strong and
steady; he had food brought him; while he was eating it, his messenger
returned. Santoine saw the man alone and, when he had dismissed him,
he sent for his daughter.

Harriet had waited helplessly at the house all day. All day the house
had been besieged. The newspaper men--or most of them--and the cro