“Straight is the narrow way,” Eli Kirke oft cried out as he expounded Holy Writ.

Ah, well, if the narrow way is straight, it has a trick of becoming tangled in a most terrible snarl!

Wheeling the log-end right about, I sat down to await M. Picot.  There was stirring in the next apartment.  An ebon head poked past the door curtain, looked about, and withdrew without detecting me.  The face I remembered at once.  It was the wife of M. Picot’s blackamoor.  Only three men had passed from the cave.  If the blackamoor were one, M. Picot and Le Borgne must be the others.

Footsteps grated on the pebbles outside.  I rose with beating heart to meet M. Picot, who held my fate in his hands.  Then a ringing pistol-shot set my pulse jumping.

I ran to the door.  Something plunged heavily against the curtain.  The robe ripped from the hangings.  In the flood of moonlight a man pitched face forward to the cave floor.  He reeled up with a cry of rage, caught blindly at the air, uttered a groan, fell back.

“M.  Picot!”

Blanched and faint, the French doctor lay with a crimsoning pool wet under his head.  “I am shot!  What will become of her?” he groaned.  “I am shot!  It was Gillam!  It was Gillam!”

Hortense and the negress came running from the inner cave.  Le Borgne and the blackamoor dashed from the open with staring horror.

“Lift me up!  For God’s sake, air!” cried M. Picot.

We laid him on the pelts in the doorway, Le Borgne standing guard outside.

Hortense stooped to stanch the wound, but the doctor motioned her off with a fierce impatience, and bade the negress lead her away.  Then he lay with closed eyes, hands clutched to the pelts, and shuddering breath.

The blackamoor had rushed to the inner cave for liquor, when M. Picot opened his eyes with a strange far look fastened upon me.

“Swear it,” he commanded.

And I thought his mind wandering.

He groaned heavily.  “Don’t you understand?  It’s Hortense.  Swear you’ll restore her—­” and his breath came with a hard metallic rattle that warned the end.

“Doctor Picot,” said I, “if you have anything to say, say it quickly and make your peace with God!”

“Swear you’ll take her back to her people and treat her as a sister,” he cried.

“I swear before God that I shall take Hortense back to her people, and that I shall treat her like a sister,” I repeated, raising my right hand.

That seemed to quiet him.  He closed his eyes.

“Sir,” said I, “have you nothing more to say?  Who are her people?”

“Is . . . is . . . any one listening?” he asked in short, hard breaths.

I motioned the others back.

“Listen”—­the words came in quick, rasping breaths.  “She is not mine . . . it was at night . . . they brought her . . . ward o’ the court . . . lands . . . they wanted me.”  There was a sharp pause, a shivering whisper.  “I didn’t poison her”—­the dying man caught convulsively at my hands—­“I swear I had no thought of harming her. . . .  They . . . paid. . . .  I fled. . . .”