I felt as one bound upon an Aztec altar, with the priest’s obsidian knife raised above my breast!

Secret and malign forces throbbed about us; forces against which we had no armor.  Dreadful as it was, I count it a mercy that the climax was reached so quickly.  And it came suddenly enough; for there in that quiet Norfolk home we found ourselves at hand grips with one of the mysterious horrors which characterized the operations of Dr. Fu-Manchu.  It was upon us before we realized it.  There is no incidental music to the dramas of real life.

As we sat on the little terrace in the creeping twilight, I remember thinking how the peace of the scene gave the lie to my fears that we bordered upon tragic things.  Then Caesar, who had been a docile patient all day, began howling again; and I saw Greba Eltham shudder.

I caught Smith’s eye, and was about to propose our retirement indoors, when the party was broken up in more turbulent fashion.  I suppose it was the presence of the girl which prompted Denby to the rash act, a desire personally to distinguish himself.  But, as I recalled afterwards, his gaze had rarely left the shrubbery since dusk, save to seek her face, and now he leaped wildly to his feet, overturning his chair, and dashed across the grass to the trees.

“Did you see it?” he yelled.  “Did you see it?”

He evidently carried a revolver.  For from the edge of the shrubbery a shot sounded, and in the flash we saw Denby with the weapon raised.

“Greba, go in and fasten the windows,” cried Eltham. 
“Mr. Smith, will you enter the bushes from the west. 
Dr. Petrie, east.  Edwards, Edwards—­” And he was off across
the lawn with the nervous activity of a cat.

As I made off in an opposite direction I heard the gardener’s voice from the lower gate, and I saw Eltham’s plan.  It was to surround the shrubbery.

Two more shots and two flashes from the dense heart of greenwood.  Then a loud cry—­I thought, from Denby—­and a second, muffled one.

Following—­silence, only broken by the howling of the mastiff.

I sprinted through the rose garden, leaped heedlessly over a bed of geranium and heliotrope, and plunged in among the bushes and under the elms.  Away on the left I heard Edwards shouting, and Eltham’s answering voice.

“Denby!” I cried, and yet louder:  “Denby!”

But the silence fell again.

Dusk was upon Redmoat now, but from sitting in the twilight my eyes had grown accustomed to gloom, and I could see fairly well what lay before me.  Not daring to think what might lurk above, below, around me, I pressed on into the midst of the thicket.

“Vernon!” came Eltham’s voice from one side.

“Bear more to the right, Edwards,” I heard Nayland Smith cry directly ahead of me.

With an eerie and indescribable sensation of impending disaster upon me, I thrust my way through to a gray patch which marked a break in the elmen roof.  At the foot of the copper beech I almost fell over Eltham.  Then Smith plunged into view.  Lastly, Edwards the gardener rounded a big rhododendron and completed the party.