None of us answered him for a moment. Then Nealman turned, rather slowly. “It sounded like the devil, didn’t it?” he said. “But it likely wasn’t anything. I’ve heard some devilish cries in the couple of weeks I’ve been here—bitterns and owls and things like that. Might have been a panther in the woods.”
Marten smiled slowly, rather contemptuously. “You’ll have to do better than that, Nealman. That wasn’t a panther. Also—it wasn’t an owl. We’d better investigate.”
“Yes—I think we had better. But you don’t know what hellish sounds some of these swamp-creatures can make. We’ll all be laughing in a minute.”
His tone was rather ragged, for all his reassuring words, and we knew he was as shaken as the rest of us. A door opened into the hall—evidently some of the other guests were already seeking the explanation of that fearful sound.
It seemed to all of us that hardly an instant had elapsed since the sound. Indeed it still rang in our ears. All that had been said had scarcely taken a breath. We rushed out, seemingly at once, into the velvet darkness. The moon was incredibly vivid in the sky.
We passed into a rose-garden, under great, arching trees, and now we could see the silver glint of the moon on the lagoon. The tide was going out and the waters lay like glass.
Through the rifts in the trees we could see further—the stretching sands, gray in the moonlight, the blue-black mysterious seas beyond. What forms the crags took, in that eerie light! There was little of reality left about them.
We heard some one pushing through the shrubbery ahead of us, and he stopped for us to come up. I recognized the dark beard and mustache of Pescini. “What was it?” he asked. Excitement had brought out a deep-buried accent, native to some South European land. “Was it further on?”
“I think so,” Nealman answered. “Down by the lagoon.”
He joined us, and we pushed on, but we spread out as we neared the shore of the lagoon. Some one’s shadow whipped by me, and I turned to find Major Dell.