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
brain, and he lay there dead with his head toward the hills.
I clutched at Harley's shoulder, but he stood rigidly, staring up the
slope past the angle of the tower, to where a gable of the Guest House
jutted out from the trees.
"Did you hear--that cry?" I whispered, "immediately after the shot?"
"I heard it."
A moment longer he stood fixedly watching, and then:
"Not a wisp of smoke," he said.
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