Byrne turned his own away from them.  Tom’s black silk neckerchief was not knotted on his breast.  It was gone.  The murderers had also taken off his shoes and stockings.  And noticing this spoliation, the exposed throat, the bare up-turned feet, Byrne felt his eyes run full of tears.  In other respects the seaman was fully dressed; neither was his clothing disarranged as it must have been in a violent struggle.  Only his checked shirt had been pulled a little out the waistband in one place, just enough to ascertain whether he had a money belt fastened round his body.  Byrne began to sob into his handkerchief.

It was a nervous outburst which passed off quickly.  Remaining on his knees he contemplated sadly the athletic body of as fine a seaman as ever had drawn a cutlass, laid a gun, or passed the weather earring in a gale, lying stiff and cold, his cheery, fearless spirit departed—­perhaps turning to him, his boy chum, to his ship out there rolling on the grey seas off an iron-bound coast, at the very moment of its flight.

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