and drawers and
chance guests alike had left pipe and tankard for sword and musket, and
were gone to fort or palisade or river bank.

I crossed the empty room and went up the creaking stairway. No one
met me or withstood me; only a pigeon perched upon the sill of a sunny
window whirred off into the blue. I glanced out of the window as I
passed it, and saw the silver river and the George and the Esperance,
with the gunners at the guns watching for Indian canoes, and saw smoke
rising from the forest on the southern shore. There had been three
houses there,--John West's and Minifie's and Crashaw's. I wondered if
mine were burning, too, at Weyanoke, and cared not if 't was so.

The door of the upper room was shut. When I raised the latch and pushed
against it, it gave at the top and middle, but there was some pressure
from within at the bottom. I pushed again, more strongly, and the door
slowly opened, moving away whatever thing had lain before it. Another
moment, and I was in the room, and had closed and barred the door behind
me.

The weight that had opposed me was the body of the Italian, lying face
downwards, upon the floor. I stooped and turned it over, and saw that
the venomous spirit had flown. The face was purple and distorted; the
lips were drawn back from the teeth in a dreadful smile. There was in
the room a faint, peculiar, not unpleasant odor. It did not seem strange
to me to find that serpent, which had coiled in my path, dead and
harmless for evermore. Death had been busy of late; if he struck down
the flower, why should he spare the thing that I pushed out of my way
with my foot?

Ten feet from the door stood a great screen, hiding from view all that
might be beyond. It was very quiet in the room, with the sunshine coming
through the window, and a breeze that smelt of the sea. I had not
cared to walk lightly or to close the door softly, and yet no voice had
challenged my entrance. For a minute I feared to find the dead physician
the room's only occupant; then I passed the screen and came upon my
enemy.

He was sitting beside a table, with his arms outstretched and his head
bowed upon them. My footfall did not rouse him; he sat there in the
sunshine as still as the figure that lay before the threshold. I thought
with a dull fury that maybe he was dead already, and I walked hastily
and heavily across the floor to the table. He was a living man, for with
the fingers of one hand he was slowly striking aga