I dropped a little behind them to examine a bit of carving--and, after all, they did not want me. I watched them pacing slowly ahead, his arm around her, black hair close to bronze-gold ringlets. Then I followed. Half were they over the bridge when through the roar of the imprisoned stream I heard my name called softly. "Goodwin! Dr. Goodwin!" Amazed, I turned. From behind the pedestal of a carved group slunk--Marakinoff! My premonition had been right. Some way he had escaped, slipped through to here. He held his hands high, came forward cautiously. "I am finished," he whispered--"Done! I don't care what _they'll_ do to me." He nodded toward the handmaiden and Larry, now at the end of the bridge and passing on, oblivious of all save each other. He drew closer. His eyes were sunken, burning, mad; his face etched with deep lines, as though a graver's tool had cut down through it. I took a step backward. A grin, like the grimace of a fiend, blasted the Russian's visage. He threw himself upon me, his hands clenching at my throat! "Larry!" I yelled--and as I spun around under the shock of his onslaught, saw the two turn, stand paralyzed, then race toward me. "But _you'll_ carry nothing out of here!" shrieked Marakinoff. "No!" My foot, darting out behind me, touched vacancy. The roaring of the racing stream deafened me. I felt its mists about me; threw myself forward. I was falling--falling--with the Russian's hand strangling me. I struck water, sank; the hands that gripped my throat relaxed for a moment their clutch. I strove to writhe loose; felt that I was being hurled with dreadful speed on--full realization came--on the breast of that racing torrent dropping from some far ocean cleft and rushing--where? A little time, a few breathless instants, I struggled with the devil who clutched me--inflexibly, indomitably. Then a shrieking as of all the pent winds of the universe in my ears--blackness! Consciousness returned slowly, agonizedly. "Larry!" I groaned. "Lakla!" A brilliant light was glowing through my closed lids. It hurt. I opened my eyes, closed them with swords and needles of dazzling pain shooting through them. Again I opened them cautiously. It was the sun! I staggered to my feet. Behind me was a shattered wall of basalt monoliths, hewn and squared. Before me was the Pacific, smooth and blue and smiling. And not far away, cast up on the strand even as I had been, was--Marakinoff! He lay there, broken and dead indeed. Yet all the waters through which we had passed--not even the waters of death themselves--could wash from his face the grin of triumph. With the last of my strength I dragged the body from the strand and pushed it out into the waves. A little billow ran up, coiled about it, and carried it away, ducking and bending. Another seized it, and another, playing with it. It floated from my sight--that which had been Marakinoff, with all his schemes to turn our fair world into an undreamed-of-hell.