“The man!” he yelled; “the dog, and now the man! I know him at last!”
Dr. Crackenthorpe broke past me with an answering cry:
“He fired my house! Stop him! The hound! Stop him!”
As he sprang forward Duke, with a sudden swoop, seized the lantern from the floor and flung it at him; and at the same instant—as I saw by the flaming arc of light it made—clutched the rope and swung himself into the vault. The lantern crashed and was extinguished. The doctor uttered a fierce oath. Spellbound I stood, and for half a dozen seconds the weltering blackness eddied with a ghastly silence. Then I heard the doctor fling past me, running out of the room with a fearful exclamation on his lips, and, as he went, scream after scream rise from the depths, so that my soul seemed to faint with the agony of it.
Groping, staggering, my brain reeling, I stumbled toward the sound.
“God forgive me!” I whispered. “Death is better than this.”
Even with the thought a new uproar broke upon my senses—the thunderous heaving onrush of a mighty torrent of water underfoot.
In a flash I knew what had happened. The hideous creature had lifted the sluice and turned the swollen flood upon the wheel.
Then the past swept over me in a hurried panorama as my poor brain paused for rest.
Who killed Modred—How did he die?