“Man,” said Jack, quietly.
“Then you stop by the boat and—”
“Bart!”
“Nay, nay, let me speak, my lad. Let me say all I want. You can trust me. If Bart Wrigley says he’ll do a thing for you, he’ll do it if he’s got the strength and life in him. So let me do this, while you wait for me. Come, now, you will!”
“No! Come with me. I must be there.”
Bart drew in a deep breath, and muttered to himself as he listened to the peculiarly changed voice in which his companion spoke.
“You’re master,” he said; “and I’m ready.”
“Yes. Take my hand, and speak lower. There may be watchers about.”
For answer Bart gripped his companion’s hand, and together they walked for some distance along the hard sand, where the spray from the rollers swept up. Then turning inland suddenly, they had taken about twenty steps to the west when a vivid flash of lightning showed them that their calculations had been exact, for there before them in all its horror, and not a dozen yards away, stood the rough gibbet with the body of a man pendent from the cross-beam, the ghastly object having stood out for a moment like a huge cameo cut in bold relief upon some mass of marble of a solid black.
“Abel! Brother!” moaned Jack, running forward to sink kneeling in the sand, and for a few moments, as Bart stood there in the black darkness with his head instinctively uncovered, there arose from before him the wild hysterical sobbings of a woman, at first in piteous appeal to the dead, then in fierce denunciation of his murderers; but as the last cry rang out there was a flickering in the sky, as if the avant garde of another vivid flash—the half-blinding sheet of flame which lit up the gibbet once again; and it seemed strange to Bart that no woman was there, only the figure of a short, well-built man, who stood looking toward him, and said in a hoarse, firm voice—