There was an old army officer, leathered and permanently tanned by decades of the dreadful Indian sun; he wore a short grizzled mustache and a stern, rather stuffy expression. There was a man of about fifty who could not have been anything but a physician, so scrubbed and competent he seemed. There was a youngish fellow with only one arm, and another whose dark glasses sheltered sightless scar-pitted hollows. There was an antique of a man, poker-thin and poker-straight and poker-hard, with a pale face and keen, faded blue eyes. And there was a girl, who had sometimes been described as a summer sky, as a star, and as other things just as lovely and unbelievable. "What ho," I said, with empty cheerfulness. "Sorry to be late. Let's get at it." "Will," said the doctor abruptly, "I forbid it. It's madness, it's criminal lunacy." "Sorry you feel that way, John. We've gone too far to stop here--and we've been all through this a hundred times." I went to the table and sat down briskly in the vacant chair beside it. Truth to tell, every muscle in my body was rebelling, was shrieking to me that John Baringer was right; only my mind still insisted that he was wrong, and I knew that if I dallied for an instant my body would conquer my brain.... I fitted my head snugly against the curious apparatus we had attached to the back of the chair. It was constructed along the lines of an old-fashioned photographer's head clamp. To the table were nailed a number of steel braces, which held a Tower musket, an obsolete firearm primed with black powder and aimed rigidly so that the load would pass within a hair's breadth of my eyes as I sat with my head pressed against the clamp. The musket was already cocked. "Let 'er go," I said, and felt glad that my voice had not cracked into falsetto. "No!" said John Baringer. "No!" None of them moved. "Have I got to do it myself?" I asked, rather angrily. The retired officer pushed the doctor aside, took two steps forward and laid his hand on the musket. "Ready?" he asked. "I am." "Hold hard," he said, and pulled the trigger. The world seemed to lift up into the air all at once, its foundations tearing apart with a noise like all hell bursting in half; then it slowly toppled down again, and everything was blackness and hot, searing death. The last thing I remember was the scream of the beautiful girl, she who was as lovely as a summer sky. CHAPTER II