Well outside the place of disappearance, looking as if they were participants in a nightmare, were the marines. Every last officer and man, with most of our weapons, had got through the cordon of Shadow Men.
It could have been a dream, but for the skeleton of Yount, there by the LCVP, and the fact that several men had touched the shadows and been severely injured. Four hands were missing—save for the bones. One man had lost an ear, but he laughed. "It could have been my whole head!" he said. "What's an ear?"
"We got through with extraordinarily good luck, sir," said Haggerty. "What do we do now, sir?"
"What can we do, except wait and see what happens next, Captain?" He had no answer for that.
Automatically, we buried the skeleton of Yount. First his closest friends went back to the spot where his body had disappeared, and hunted for remnants. They didn't find so much as a button of his uniform or a screw from his weapons, or any part even of the steel blade of his trench knife. The detached shadow had absorbed everything of Yount save his bones.
The shadows were, in some fashion, chemical, that seemed clear enough. But beyond that we were all stuck. They were not human. They were maneuverable, plainly; but not self-maneuverable. Who, then, or what, controlled and manipulated the Shadow Men?
The Shadow Men, it gave us a shiver to note, left no footprints. Nor had they in any way affected the landing craft.
After the starlit funeral, we re-formed as we had been before the sudden appearance of the Shadow Men.
"Mother of God!" cried Krane, the trumpeter. "It's starting again. But this time it's different!"
We all whirled to look. Coming out of the northwest was a group of scarecrow figures. They didn't look like our Shadow Men. I didn't recognize them at first, though I could hear their hoarse panting, their rasped words. They staggered like men far gone in hunger and thirst. One of them fell on his face, struggled to his knees, came on.