“‘What sort of a noise is it?’ I asked him. ‘Surely to Heaven you’re sufficiently young and healthy not to be awakened by a bally fellow whistling?’ “‘It isn’t that that wakes me, Hugh,’ he answered slowly. ‘I wake before it starts. Each night about the same time I suddenly find myself wide awake—listening. Sometimes it’s ten minutes before it starts—sometimes almost at once; but it always comes. A faint, sweet whistle—three or four notes, going on and on—until I think I’ll go mad. It seems to be calling me.’ “‘But why the devil don’t you go and see what it is?’ I cried peevishly. “‘Because’—and he stared at me with a shamefaced expression in his eyes—‘because I daren’t.’ “‘Rot!’ I said angrily. ‘Look here, young fellow, nerves are bad things anywhere—here they’re especially bad. You pull yourself together.’ “He flushed all over his face, and shut up like an oyster, which made me rather sorry I’d spoke so sharply. But one does hear funny noises in the jungle, and it doesn’t do to become fanciful. “And then one evening McAndrew came over to dinner. It was during the meal that I mentioned Jack’s nocturnal serenader, expecting that Mac would treat it as lightly as I did. “‘Seven times you’ve heard him, Jack, haven’t you,’ I said, ‘and always the same tune?’ “‘Always the same tune,’ he answered quietly. “‘Can you whistle it now?’ asked McAndrew, laying down his knife and fork and staring at Jack. “‘Easily,’ said Jack. ‘It goes like this’—and he whistled about six notes. ‘On and on it goes—never varying——Why, McAndrew, what the devil is the matter?’ “I glanced at McAndrew in amazement; then out of the corner of my eye I saw the native servant, who was shivering like a jelly. “‘Man—are you sure?’ said Mac, and his face was white. “‘Of course I’m sure,’ answered Jack quietly. ‘Why?’ “‘That tune you whistled—is not good for a white man to hear.’ The Scotsman seemed strangely uneasy. ‘And ye’ve heard it seven nights? Do you know it, Walton?’ “‘I do not,’ I said grimly. ‘What’s the mystery?’ “But McAndrew was shaking his head dourly, and for a while he did not answer. “‘Mind ye,’ he said at length, ‘I’m not saying there’s anything in it at all, but I would not care to hear that whistled outside my window. I heard it once—years ago—when I was ’way up in the Arakan Mountains. Soft and sweet it was—rising and falling in the night air, and going on ceaselessly. ’Way up above me was a monastery, one into which no white man has ever been. And the noise was coming from there. I had to go; my servants wouldn’t stop. And when I asked them why, they told me that the priests were calling for a sacrifice. If they stopped, they told me, it might be one of us. That no one could tell how Death would come, or to whom, but come it must—when the Pipes of Death were heard. And the tune you whistled, Manderby, was the tune the Pipes of Death were playing.’ “‘But that’s all bunkum, Mac,’ I said angrily. ‘We’re not in the Arakans here.’