Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/147

 know help was coming. No answer came. He dashed on the more wildly, straight ahead at first, and then uncertainly, zigzagging a little this way, and a little that.

"Lahleet! he called more loudly. "Lahleet!" then checked his pace to listen. The only sound that came to him was the violent pounding of his own heart; but as his eyes roved through the short vistas of the forest they stopped at a log-like thing in a crush of ferns, log-like but with certain marked resemblance to a human form. He rushed upon it.

It was the body of a man, face down in the green tangle, wearing a blue flannel shirt and corduroy trousers. The trousers were encircled at the waist by a black leather belt while their bottoms were thrust into high laced boots. The back of the neck showed a reddish skin, purpling into the roots of well-kept hair.

Harrington laid his hand on the back below the left shoulder blade where a heartbeat should have been felt. There was none. Seizing an arm he turned the body over and drew back with a start. It was the face of Eckstrom—Count Eckstrom, with his carefully trimmed Vandyke, with the lace-work of dissipation in the puffs beneath his eyes, and—with a dark spot growing on the breast of the blue flannel shirt. A machinegun fire of questions leaped into Harrington's mind. What was Count Eckstrom doing in, say, a timber cruiser's garb? And how had he got into it so quickly from his golfing clothes? What was he doing on Hurricane Island? What was he doing with a bullet through his heart? And where was Lahleet?

The last question got its answer first. As, turning from the body, Harrington's eyes swept around him