They had reached the edge of the little grove as Palmer finished speaking. Gordon's whole bearing seemed to have changed entirely. His eye was watchful, his step alert, as he snapped the sixteen-gage open and quietly slipped in a couple of shells. "We'll only wait a few minutes," he said. "Sometimes they come straight from the north. Would you mind looking out that way?"
Palmer obeyed, staring moodily out across the placid surface of the water. The sun had set, and in the faint, gathering dusk the brooding silence of the lake had about it something sinister, unearthly, threatening. Man, and his petty passions, his childish hopes and fears, seemed somehow strangely dwarfed into utter insignificance in the midst of nature's impassive, inscrutable calm. Involuntarily Palmer shivered.
"I'm afraid it's too late for them, Gordon," he said slowly. "I don't really believe--"
The sentence was left unfinished. With a motion quick as thought, Gordon threw the sixteen-gage to his shoulder, pressed the barrel to Palmer's back just below the left shoulder blade, and pressed the trigger.
At the muffled report the murdered man's arms flew out and up as if grasping for support, his head twitched back sharply, and like a log he fell. A horrible choking sound issued from his distorted lips, his body twitched convulsively once or twice, and he lay still, his head twisted to one side, the bared teeth grinning upward from the mouth contorted into the ghostly semblance of a smile.
Mechanically Gordon leaned his gun against a tree; then looked fearfully about him. Still, calm, motionless, the lake lay before him. No wind stirred the pines. The silence was the silence of death. A sickening faintness crept over him. He stifled an impulse to shout for help, and set his teeth sharply together. "God!" he muttered, "God!" Then, with averted face, he picked up the ghastly, inert thing that had been Harry Palmer, and, staggering with it to the very edge of the quicksand, cast it from him with all his strength. A moment, and it had disappeared from sight.
Before the fire in the big library May Sinclair sat gazing into the leaping flames, the book she had taken from its shelf lying unopened in her lap, her thoughts far away. Pleasant, indeed, must have been the land through which they were journeying, for a smile played about her lips, and the little sigh that escaped her as she nestled more closely in the big arm-chair was but of content.