“Am I likely to do a cross-country run in my underclothes?” demanded his brother.
The young man was down the stairs in two leaps, and out upon the lawn. Helga’s fair head shone far to the south on a hillock’s top. She was running.
“Take the cross-cut!” shouted Dick Colton. “You can head her off at Graveyard Point. I’ll follow.”
There were few men of his time who could keep near Everard Colton to the end of a mile run. Heartbreaking country this was, with its ups and downs; but the young man had the instinct of a cross-country runner, and subconsciously his feet led him along the easiest course. When he came out on the summit of the cliff above Graveyard Point, his eyes, eagerly searching, saw the flying figure of the girl he loved coming down the beach, a quarter of a mile away.
“Helga, Helga!” he shouted. “I’m coming to you!”
Her ringing soprano came back to him, like an echo magically transmuted into golden beauty: “The other side! Around the point.”
She waved him vehemently toward the hidden shore beyond the headland. Something of her foreboding terror passed into the soul of her lover. Plunging down into the gully, Everard ran out upon the beach and doubled the point. Whatever peril there was, if any existed, lay there; he would reach it first. The waves almost washed his feet as he toiled through the loose sand at the base of the little ravine. Breathless, he pushed on until he reached the point, where he had full view of the stretch of sand. Then at what he saw the breath came back to him in one gasping inhalation. He stopped short in his tracks, and stood shaking.
The sun had just risen above the cloudbank. Black, on the shining glory of the beach, a man lay sprawled grotesquely. It was almost at the spot where Serdholm had been found. Though the face was hidden and the posture distorted, Everard knew him instantly for Haynes, and as instantly knew that he was dead. He ran forward and bent over the body.
Haynes had been struck opposite the gully, by a weapon driven with fearful impetus between his ribs from the back, piercing his heart. A dozen staggering prints showed where he had plunged forward before he fell. The flight was involuntary—for he was dead almost on the stroke—the blind, mechanical instinct of escape from the death-dealing agency. There was no mistaking that great gash in the back. Haynes had been killed as Serdholm was.
Sickening with the certainty of what he was to find, Everard Colton turned his eyes to the tablet of the sand. There, exactly as the ill-fated reporter had drawn it on his map, the grisly track of the talons stretched in double line across the clean beach, toward the gully’s mouth. Except for this the sand was blank.