“What was it, Killdare?” he asked me. “I couldn’t tell from where it was——”
“The lagoon!” I answered. In the instant Van Hope and Dell caught up with me, and the four of us raced down the driveway.
Instinctively we went first to the place on the shore where Florey had been slain the night before. The action was a clear indication of what was in our minds—that this matter was in some way darkly related to the crime of the night before. But the sand was bare, and the grass unshadowed in the moonlight.
For a moment we stood, aghast and shaken, gazing out over the lagoon. It was still as glass. The tide was running out, and not a wave stirred in all its darkened expanse. We saw the image of the moon far out, scarcely wavering, and the long, bright trail that it made across the water to our eyes. The night was still stifling hot, and the lagoon conveyed an image of coolness.
“Don’t stand here!” Fargo cried. “We’ve got to make a search. Some poor devil is likely lying somewhere in these gardens——”
The house was lighted now, and in an uproar, and some of the other guests were racing down the driveway to us. In this regard it might have been last night’s tragedy reënacted. There was, however, one significant change.
The iron self-control, the coolness, the perfect discipline of mind and muscle that had marked the finding of the dead body on the shore the preceding night was no longer entirely manifest. These northern men, cold as flint ordinarily, were no longer wholly self-mastered. One glance at their faces, loose and pale in the moonlight, and the first sound of their voices told this fact only too plainly. It was not, however, that they were completely broken. Their training and their manhood was too good for that.
We didn’t stop to answer their queries. We began to search through the gardens, examining every shadow, peering into every covert. We tried to direct each other according to our several ideas as to the source of the sound. We all agreed, however, that the sound had seemed to come from the immediate vicinity of the natural rock wall that formed the lagoon.
The next few moments were not very coherent. We called back and forth, encountered one another in the shadows, knew moments of apprehension when the brush walls cut us off from our fellows, but we found nothing that might have explained that desperate cry of a few moments before. At last some one called out commandingly from the shores of the lagoon.
“Come here, every one,” he said. The voice rose above our confused utterances, and all of us, recognizing a leader, hurried to him. Pescini was standing beside the craggy shore, a strange and imposing figure in the wealth of moonlight, at the edge of that tranquil water.