Near by lay a shotgun and a game bag through the meshes of which was seen the plumage of shot birds.  All about were evidences of a furious struggle; small sprouts of poison-oak were bent and denuded of leaf and bark; dead and rotting leaves had been pushed into heaps and ridges on both sides of the legs by the action of other feet than theirs; alongside the hips were unmistakable impressions of human knees.

The nature of the struggle was made clear by a glance at the dead man’s throat and face.  While breast and hands were white, those were purple—­almost black.  The shoulders lay upon a low mound, and the head was turned back at an angle otherwise impossible, the expanded eyes staring blankly backward in a direction opposite to that of the feet.  From the froth filling the open mouth the tongue protruded, black and swollen.  The throat showed horrible contusions; not mere finger-marks, but bruises and lacerations wrought by two strong hands that must have buried themselves in the yielding flesh, maintaining their terrible grasp until long after death.  Breast, throat, face, were wet; the clothing was saturated; drops of water, condensed from the fog, studded the hair and mustache.

All this the two men observed without speaking—­almost at a glance.  Then Holker said: 

“Poor devil! he had a rough deal.”

Jaralson was making a vigilant circumspection of the forest, his shotgun held in both hands and at full cock, his finger upon the trigger.

“The work of a maniac,” he said, without withdrawing his eyes from the inclosing wood.  “It was done by Branscom—­Pardee.”

Something half hidden by the disturbed leaves on the earth caught Holker’s attention.  It was a red-leather pocketbook.  He picked it up and opened it.  It contained leaves of white paper for memoranda, and upon the first leaf was the name “Halpin Frayser.”  Written in red on several succeeding leaves—­scrawled as if in haste and barely legible—­were the following lines, which Holker read aloud, while his companion continued scanning the dim gray confines of their narrow world and hearing matter of apprehension in the drip of water from every burdened branch: 

“Enthralled by some mysterious spell, I stood
In the lit gloom of an enchanted wood. 
   The cypress there and myrtle twined their boughs,
Significant, in baleful brotherhood.

“The brooding willow whispered to the yew;
Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue,
   With immortelles self-woven into strange
Funereal shapes, and horrid nettles grew.

“No song of bird nor any drone of bees,
Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze: 
   The air was stagnant all, and Silence was
A living thing that breathed among the trees.

“Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,
Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb. 
   With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves
Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.