Manson had faced death on the battlefield when comrades were falling beside him; he had paced for hours on the picket-line in the darkness of night, feeling that at any moment an enemy might fire at him from some thicket or from behind some tree or rock; but amid all these dangers he had not felt the nameless horror that came to him as he saw that hideous skull grinning at him there in the tangle of wreckage just at dusk on Pocket Island. It was like a hand reaching out from a grave, or a voice calling to him from a tomb. Alone on that little, sea-grit isle, trembling beneath the waves that beat upon it, and in the fast-gathering darkness he stood for a moment spellbound. All the ghostly tales he had been told of this spot came to him in an instant and with the force of truth, and had he at that moment beheld some spectral figure rise from among the black rocks he would not have been surprised. Then feeling his strength leaving him, he turned and ran as fast as he could back to where he had built the shelter. With trembling hands he managed to start a fire and sat down beside it. It was a little comfort, but not enough to drive away the dread that seemed to increase as the night grew blacker. He dared not use his small stock of fuel except sparingly, fearing it would not last till morning, and he should be left in total darkness. Back of him was the impassable thicket, and in front the rock-bound shore, and as he listened to the booming of the surges he could see, just in the edge of the zone of light, those eyeless sockets and that mocking grin ever hovering near. Then as the night wore on and the wind increased, slowly rising and falling and rising again, each time a little louder, came that ominous, bellowing sound. It was not like that of any creature he had ever heard or dreamed of, but rather the menace of some horrible monster unknown to earth or air. All the stories of hideous shapes that dwelt beneath the ocean waves, and all the old legends of the sea and its unknown denizens, came to him, and ever mingling with these phantasms that seemed to be crawling all about was that grinning skull.