Surrounded at a little distance by armed and watchful friends, Byring felt utterly alone.  Yielding himself to the solemn and mysterious spirit of the time and place, he had forgotten the nature of his connection with the visible and audible aspects and phases of the night.  The forest was boundless; men and the habitations of men did not exist.  The universe was one primeval mystery of darkness, without form and void, himself the sole, dumb questioner of its eternal secret.  Absorbed in thoughts born of this mood, he suffered the time to slip away unnoted.  Meantime the infrequent patches of white light lying amongst the tree-trunks had undergone changes of size, form and place.  In one of them near by, just at the roadside, his eye fell upon an object that he had not previously observed.  It was almost before his face as he sat; he could have sworn that it had not before been there.  It was partly covered in shadow, but he could see that it was a human figure.  Instinctively he adjusted the clasp of his sword-belt and laid hold of his pistol—­again he was in a world of war, by occupation an assassin.

The figure did not move.  Rising, pistol in hand, he approached.  The figure lay upon its back, its upper part in shadow, but standing above it and looking down upon the face, he saw that it was a dead body.  He shuddered and turned from it with a feeling of sickness and disgust, resumed his seat upon the log, and forgetting military prudence struck a match and lit a cigar.  In the sudden blackness that followed the extinction of the flame he felt a sense of relief; he could no longer see the object of his aversion.  Nevertheless, he kept his eyes set in that direction until it appeared again with growing distinctness.  It seemed to have moved a trifle nearer.

“Damn the thing!” he muttered.  “What does it want?”

It did not appear to be in need of anything but a soul.

Byring turned away his eyes and began humming a tune, but he broke off in the middle of a bar and looked at the dead body.  Its presence annoyed him, though he could hardly have had a quieter neighbor.  He was conscious, too, of a vague, indefinable feeling that was new to him.  It was not fear, but rather a sense of the supernatural—­in which he did not at all believe.

“I have inherited it,” he said to himself.  “I suppose it will require a thousand ages—­perhaps ten thousand—­for humanity to outgrow this feeling.  Where and when did it originate?  Away back, probably, in what is called the cradle of the human race—­the plains of Central Asia.  What we inherit as a superstition our barbarous ancestors must have held as a reasonable conviction.  Doubtless they believed themselves justified by facts whose nature we cannot even conjecture in thinking a dead body a malign thing endowed with some strange power of mischief, with perhaps a will and a purpose to exert it.  Possibly they had some awful form