“You don’t mean you’ve traced him here!” exclaimed Cleves under his breath. “He’s here on the St. Johns River, somewhere. He came up in a motor-boat, but left it east of Orchard Cove. Benton knows this country. He’s covering the motor-boat. And I—came here to see how you are getting on.” “And to warn us,” added Cleves quietly. “Well—yes. He’s got that stuff. It’s deadlier than the newspaper suspects. And I guess—I guess, Cleves, he’s one of those damned Yezidee witch-doctors—or sorcerers, as they call them;—one of that sect of Assassins sent over here to work havoc on feeble minds and do murder on the side.” “Why do you think so?” “Because the dirty beast lugs his shroud around with him—a bed-sheet stolen from the New Willard in Washington. “We were so close to him in Jacksonville that we got it, and his luggage. But we didn’t get him, the rat! God knows how he knew we were waiting for him in his room. He never came back to get his luggage. “But he stole a bed-sheet from his hotel in St. Augustine, and that is how we picked him up again. Then, at Palm Beach, we lost the beggar, but somehow or other I felt it in my bones that he was after you—you and your wife. So I sent Benton to Ormond and I went to Palatka. Benton picked up his trail. It led toward you—toward the St. Johns. And the reptile has been here forty-eight hours, trying to nose you out, I suppose——” Tressa came into the room. Both men looked at her. Cleves said in a guarded voice: “To-day, on the golf links at Orchard Cove, there was a young man in white flannels—very polite and courteous to us—but—Tressa thought she saw him slinking through the woods as though following and watching us.” “My man, probably,” said Recklow. He turned quietly to Tressa and sketched for her the substance of what he had just told Cleves. “The man in white flannels on the golf links,” said Cleves, “was well built and rather handsome, and not more than twenty-five. I thought he was a Jew.” “I thought so too,” said Tressa, calmly, “until I saw him in the woods. And then—and then—suddenly it came to me that his smile was the smile of a treacherous Shaman sorcerer. “... And the idea haunts me—the memory of those smooth-faced, smiling men in white—men who smile only when they slay—when they slay body and soul under the iris skies of Yian!—O God, merciful, long suffering,” she whispered, staring into the East, “deliver our souls from Satan who was stoned, and our bodies from the snare of the Yezidee!” CHAPTER IX THE WEST WIND The night grew sweet with the scent of orange bloom, and all the perfumed darkness was vibrant with the feathery whirr of hawk-moths’ wings. Tressa had taken her moon-lute to the hammock, but her fingers rested motionless on the strings. Cleves and Recklow, shoulder to shoulder, paced the moonlit path along the hedges of oleander and hibiscus which divided garden from jungle.