“But McAndrew was shaking his head dourly, and for a while he did not answer.
“ ‘Mind ye,’ he said at length, ‘I’m not saying there’s anything in it at all, but I would not care to hear that whistled outside my window. I heard it once—years ago—when I was ’way up in the Arakan Mountains. Soft and sweet it was—rising and falling in the night air, and going on ceaselessly. ’Way up above me was a monastery, one into which no white man has ever been. And the noise was coming from there. I had to go; my servants wouldn’t stop. And when I asked them why, they told me that the priests were calling for a sacrifice. If they stopped, they told me, it might be one of us. That no one could tell how Death would come, or to whom, but come it must—when the Pipes of Death were heard. And the tune you whistled, Manderby, was the tune the Pipes of Death were playing.’
“ ‘But that’s all bunkum, Mac,’ I said angrily. ‘We’re not in the Arakans here.’
“ ‘Maybe,’ he answered doggedly. ‘But I’m a Highlander, and—I would not care to hear that tune.’
“I could see Jack was impressed; as a matter of fact I was myself—more than I cared to admit. Sounds rot here, I know, but out there, with the dim-lit forest around one, it was different.
“McAndrew was stopping with us that night. Jack, with the stubbornness of the young, had flatly refused to change his room, and turned in early, while Mac and I sat up talking. And it was not till we went to bed ourselves that I again alluded to the whistle.
“ ‘You don’t really think it meant anything, Mac, do you?’ I asked him, and he shrugged his shoulders.
“ ‘Maybe it is just a native who has heard it,’ he said guardedly, and further than that he refused to commit himself.
“I suppose it was about two o’clock when I was awakened by a hand being thrust through my mosquito curtains.
“ ‘Walton, come at once!’ It was McAndrew’s voice, and it was shaking. ‘There’s devil’s work going on, I tell you—devil’s work.’