, drawn.

Section 6

I halted, and stood planning what I had to do.

Should I go to bungalow after bungalow until one of the two I sought
answered to my rap? But suppose some servant intervened!

Should I wait where I was--perhaps until morning--watching? And
meanwhile------

All the nearer bungalows were very still now. If I walked softly
to them, from open windows, from something seen or overheard,
I might get a clue to guide me. Should I advance circuitously,
creeping upon them, or should I walk straight to the door? It was
bright enough for her to recognize me clearly at a distance of many
paces.

The difficulty to my mind lay in this, that if I involved other
people by questions, I might at last confront my betrayers with
these others close about me, ready to snatch my weapon and seize
my hands. Besides, what names might they bear here?

"Boom!" the sound crept upon my senses, and then again it came.

I turned impatiently as one turns upon an impertinence, and beheld
a great ironclad not four miles out, steaming fast across the
dappled silver, and from its funnels sparks, intensely red, poured
out into the night. As I turned, came the hot flash of its guns,
firing seaward, and answering this, red flashes and a streaming
smoke in the line between sea and sky. So I remembered it, and I
remember myself staring at it--in a state of stupid arrest. It was
an irrelevance. What had these things to do with me?

With a shuddering hiss, a rocket from a headland beyond the village
leapt up and burst hot gold against the glare, and the sound of
the third and fourth guns reached me.

The windows of the dark bungalows, one after another, leapt out,
squares of ruddy brightness that flared and flickered and became
steadily bright. Dark heads appeared looking seaward, a door opened,
and sent out a brief lane of yellow to mingle and be lost in the
comet's brightness. That brought me back to the business in hand.

"Boom! boom!" and when I looked again at the great ironclad,
a little torchlike spurt of flame wavered behind her funnels. I
could hear the throb and clangor of her straining engines. . . .

I became aware of the voices of people calling to one another in
the village. A white-robed, hooded figure, some man in a bathing
wrap, absurdly suggestive of an Arab in his burnous, came out from
one of the nearer bungalows, and stood clear and still and shadowless
in the glare.

He put his hands to shade his seawa