Eldon Smith jumped to the window and throwing it up with a bang, leaned out into the darkness. “Did you hear that?” he cried. McDale was beside him instantly. They stood, rigid, intent, as a faint, woeful, high-pitched scream of abject terror quivered in the still air. Instantly the house was alive. Somebody was calling for lanterns. Another voice was shouting to Professor Ravenden to come back, to wait, not to venture out into the night without light. The two reporters, with the Colton brothers, got to the piazza at the same time. Meantime the shrieks grew louder. They came short and at regular intervals, with an almost mechanical effect. “That’s like hysteria,” said Dick Colton. “Can anyone make out just where it comes from?” As if in reply, the professor’s precise accents were heard. “This way. He is here.” There was a rush of the men. “I have him,” called Professor Ravenden. Once more the voice was raised, but subsided into a long, sobbing moan. Then the savant staggered into view, carrying the limp form of the young Swede. “He has fainted,” he said. “He was rushing by me, quite unheeding my call, when I caught him and he fell, as if shot. I trust he is not injured.” “Unhurt,” said Dick Colton, “but literally frightened almost to death.” Henkle came to half an hour later. No explanation could be had of him, other than a shuddering indication of some overhanging terror. Once he made a sweeping gesture of the arms, much as had Whalley on the night of the wreck. The physician gave him a sleeping powder and arranged to see him early in the morning. He never saw the boy again. With the first light he was gone, and his little belongings with him. Afterward they found out that he had walked to the station, and taken the morning train. “There’s a possible clue lost,” said Dick Colton to the professor, “that might have helped us.” But Professor Ravenden was little concerned. He had discovered a print which might possibly indicate a rudimentary sixth toe on the pteranodon and he was absorbed in measurements. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE PROFESSOR’S SERMON FOLLOWING the injunction left by Haynes, they buried him in the wind-swept knoll behind the Third House. A clergyman who had been sent for from New York took charge of the services, which were attended by the score of newspaper men and the little Third House group. A pompous, precise, and rather important person, was the clergyman; encased within a shell of prejudice which shut him off from any true estimate of the man over whose body he was to speak. In Haynes he was able to see only an agent in a rather disapproved enterprise, mighty, indeed, but, to his unseeing eye, without the ideals which he had formulated for himself, and for those upon whom he imposed his standards. So his address was purely formal; with a note of the patronising and the exculpatory as if there were something to be condoned in the life which the reporter had laid down.