第49章

He perceived that the six brass buttons of Tom's jacket had been cut off.He shuddered at the notion of the two miserable and repulsive witches busying themselves ghoulishly about the defenceless body of his friend.Cut off.Perhaps with the same knife which...The head of one trembled; the other was bent double, and their eyes were red and bleared, their infamous claws unsteady...It must have been in this very room too, for Tom could not have been killed in the open and brought in here afterwards.Of that Byrne was certain.Yet those devilish crones could not have killed him themselves even by taking him unawares -and Tom would be always on his guard of course.Tom was a very wide awake wary man when engaged on any service...And in fact how did they murder him? Who did? In what way?

Byrne jumped up, snatched the lamp off the table, and stooped swiftly over the body.The light revealed on the clothing no stain, no trace, no spot of blood anywhere.Byrne's hands began to shake so that he had to set the lamp on the floor and turn away his head in order to recover from this agitation.

Then he began to explore that cold, still, and rigid body for a stab, a gunshot wound, for the trace of some killing blow.He felt all over the skull anxiously.It was whole.He slipped his hand under the neck.It was unbroken.With terrified eyes he peered close under the chin and saw no marks of strangulation on the throat.

There were no signs anywhere.He was just dead.

Impulsively Byrne got away from the body as if the mystery of an incomprehensible death had changed his pity into suspicion and dread.The lamp on the floor near the set, still face of the seaman showed it staring at the ceiling as if despairingly.In the circle of light Byrne saw by the undisturbed patches of thick dust on the floor that there had been no struggle in that room."He has died outside," he thought.Yes, outside in that narrow corridor, where there was hardly room to turn, the mysterious death had come to his poor dear Tom.The impulse of snatching up his pistols and rushing out of the room abandoned Byrne suddenly.For Tom, too, had been armed - with just such powerless weapons as he himself possessed - pistols, a cutlass! And Tom had died a nameless death, by incomprehensible means.

A new thought came to Byrne.That stranger knocking at the door and fleeing so swiftly at his appearance had come there to remove the body.Aha! That was the guide the withered witch had promised would show the English officer the shortest way of rejoining his man.A promise, he saw it now, of dreadful import.He who had knocked would have two bodies to deal with.Man and officer would go forth from the house together.For Byrne was certain now that he would have to die before the morning - and in the same mysterious manner, leaving behind him an unmarked body.

The sight of a smashed head, of a throat cut, of a gaping gunshot wound, would have been an inexpressible relief.It would have soothed all his fears.His soul cried within him to that dead man whom he had never found wanting in danger."Why don't you tell me what I am to look for, Tom? Why don't you?" But in rigid immobility, extended on his back, he seemed to preserve an austere silence, as if disdaining in the finality of his awful knowledge to hold converse with the living.

Suddenly Byrne flung himself on his knees by the side of the body, and dry-eyed, fierce, opened the shirt wide on the breast, as if to tear the secret forcibly from that cold heart which had been so loyal to him in life! Nothing! Nothing! He raised the lamp, and all the sign vouchsafed to him by that face which used to be so kindly in expression was a small bruise on the forehead - the least thing, a mere mark.The skin even was not broken.He stared at it a long time as if lost in a dreadful dream.Then he observed that Tom's hands were clenched as though he had fallen facing somebody in a fight with fists.His knuckles, on closer view, appeared somewhat abraded.Both hands.

The discovery of these slight signs was more appalling to Byrne than the absolute absence of every mark would have been.So Tom had died striking against something which could be hit, and yet could kill one without leaving a wound - by a breath.

Terror, hot terror, began to play about Byrne's heart like a tongue of flame that touches and withdraws before it turns a thing to ashes.He backed away from the body as far as he could, then came forward stealthily casting fearful glances to steal another look at the bruised forehead.There would perhaps be such a faint bruise on his own forehead - before the morning.

"I can't bear it," he whispered to himself.Tom was for him now an object of horror, a sight at once tempting and revolting to his fear.He couldn't bear to look at him.

At last, desperation getting the better of his increasing horror, he stepped forward from the wall against which he had been leaning, seized the corpse under the armpits, and began to lug it over to the bed.The bare heels of the seaman trailed on the floor noiselessly.He was heavy with the dead weight of inanimate objects.With a last effort Byrne landed him face downwards on the edge of the bed, rolled him over, snatched from under this stiff passive thing a sheet with which he covered it over.Then he spread the curtains at head and foot so that joining together as he shook their folds they hid the bed altogether from his sight.

He stumbled towards a chair, and fell on it.The perspiration poured from his face for a moment, and then his veins seemed to carry for a while a thin stream of half, frozen blood.Complete terror had possession of him now, a nameless terror which had turned his heart to ashes.