Again came the lightning, and again he saw that tragic, ghost-like figure waiting in the storm.  Three times he saw it.  And he knew that the mysterious, bearded giant was an old man.  The fourth time the lightning came, the figure was gone.  And in that flare it was the bowed figure of Kedsty he saw hurrying up the gravel path to the door.

Quickly Kent covered the window, but he did not relight the lamp.  Before Kedsty could have reached the foot of the stair, he had unlocked the door.  Cautiously he opened it three or four inches and sat down with his back against the wall, listening.  He heard Kedsty pass through into the big room where Marette had waited for him a short time before.  After that there was silence except for the tumult of the storm.

For an hour Kent listened.  In all that time he did not hear a sound from the lower hall or from Marette’s room.  He wondered if she was sleeping, and if Kedsty had gone to bed, waiting for morning before he set in action his bloodhounds of the law.

Kent had no intention of disturbing the comfortable looking bed of blankets.  He was not only sleepless, but filled with a premonition of events about to happen.  He felt impinging itself more and more upon him a sense of watchfulness.  That Inspector Kedsty and Marette Radisson were under the same roof, and that there was some potent and mysterious reason which kept Kedsty from betraying the girl’s presence, was the thought which troubled him most.  He was not developing further the plans for his own escape.

He was thinking of Marette.  What was her power over Kedsty?  Why was it that Kedsty would like to see her dead?  Why was she in his house?  Again and again he asked himself the questions and found no answers to them.  And yet, even in this purgatory of mystery that environed him, he felt himself happier than he had ever been in his life.  For Marette was not four or five hundred miles down the river.  She was in the same house with him.  And he had told her that he loved her.  He was glad that he had been given courage to let her know that.  He relighted the lamp, and opened his watch and placed it on the table, where frequently he could look at the time.  He wanted to smoke his pipe, but the odor of tobacco, he was sure, would reach Kedsty, unless the Inspector had actually retired into his bedroom for the night.

Half a dozen times he questioned himself as to the identity of the ghostly apparition he had seen in the lightning flare of the storm.  Perhaps it was some one of Fingers’ strange friends from out of the wilderness, Mooie’s partner in watching the bungalow.  The picture of that giant of a man with his great beard and long hair, as his eyes had caught him in a sea of electrical fire, was indelibly burned into his brain.  It was a tragic picture.

Again he put out the light and bared the blanketed window, but he saw nothing but the sodden gleam of the earth when the lightning flashed.  A second time he opened the door a few inches and sat down with his back to the wall, listening.