"My God, I am too late! They have got him!"

Then, hotfoot, I was making for the entrance to the garden. Just as I
came to it and raced down the steps I heard another sound the memory of
which haunts me to this day.

Where it came from I had no idea. Perhaps I was too confused to judge
accurately. It might have come from the house, or from the slopes
beyond the house, But it was a sort of shrill, choking laugh, and it
set the ultimate touch of horror upon a _scene macabre_ which, even as
I write of it, seems unreal to me.

I ran up the path to where Harley was kneeling beside the sun-dial.
Analysis of my emotions at this moment were futile; I can only say that
I had come to a state of stupefaction. Face downward on the grass, arms
outstretched and fists clenched, lay Colonel Menendez. I think I saw
him move convulsively, but as I gained his side Harley looked up at me,
and beneath the tan which he never lost his face had grown pale. He
spoke through clenched teeth.

"Merciful God," he said, "he is shot through the head."

One glance I gave at the ghastly wound in the base of the Colonel's
skull, and then swayed backward in a sort of nausea. To see a man die
in the heat of battle, a man one has known and called friend, is
strange and terrible. Here in this moon-bathed Tudor garden it was a
horror almost beyond my powers to endure.

Paul Harley, without touching the prone figure, stood up. Indeed no
examination of the victim was necessary. A rifle bullet had pierced his