religion and that which blooms out of Voodoo."

The blaze of the spring season had burst upon Seawood, littering its
foreshore with famines and bathing-machines, with nomadic preachers and
nigger minstrels, before the two friends saw it again, and long before
the storm of pursuit after the strange secret society had died away.
Almost on every hand the secret of their purpose perished with them.
The man of the hotel was found drifting dead on the sea like so much
seaweed; his right eye was closed in peace, but his left eye was
wide open, and glistened like glass in the moon. Nigger Ned had been
overtaken a mile or two away, and murdered three policemen with his
closed left hand. The remaining officer was surprised--nay, pained--and
the negro got away. But this was enough to set all the English papers in
a flame, and for a month or two the main purpose of the British Empire
was to prevent the buck nigger (who was so in both senses) escaping by
any English port. Persons of a figure remotely reconcilable with his
were subjected to quite extraordinary inquisitions, made to scrub their
faces before going on board ship, as if each white complexion were made
up like a mask, of greasepaint. Every negro in England was put under
special regulations and made to report himself; the outgoing ships would
no more have taken a nigger than a basilisk. For people had found out
how fearful and vast and silent was the force of the savage secret
society, and by the time Flambeau and Father Brown were leaning on the
parade parapet in April, the Black Man meant in England almost what he
once meant in Scotland.

"He must be still in England," observed Flambeau, "and horridly well
hidden, too. They must have found him at the ports if he had only
whitened his face."

"You see, he is really a clever man," said Father Brown apologetically.
"And I'm sure he wouldn't whiten his face."

"Well, but what would he do?"

"I think," said Father Brown, "he would blacken his face."

Flambeau, leaning motionless on the parapet, laughed and said: "My dear
fellow!"

Father Brown, also leaning motionless on the parapet, moved one finger
for an instant into the direction of the soot-masked niggers singing on
the sands.

TEN -- The Salad of Colonel Cray

FATHER BROWN was walking home from Mass on a white weird morning when
the mists were slowly lifting--one of those mornings when the very
element of light appears as something mysterious and n