Wonderful days that glittered with the gold men were extracting from California's soil. Gone now, forever. And lovely ladies, turned to dust. Ugh-unpleasant thought! Look at the windows. Need washing, don't they? Or is it the heavy yellow fog from the tule-fields, pressing close against the paces, trying to get in? Quiet-oppressively quiet-what has become of everybody? No sound save the slow deliberate clicking of the big clock in the hallway. The voice of Time, who had conquered all these people on the wall. "I'll-get-you-too. "I'll-get-you-too." Was the clock really saying that? All right-some day, perhaps-but not yet. Now I had youth. "My boy, you don't know what you've got." Oh, yes, I do. Youth-and Mary Will. She, too, must be mine. She had looked wonderful. Where was she? Was I to be left alone forever with the confounded clock?

Suddenly from across the hall came a cry, sharp, uncanny, terrible. I ran out in the direction from which it had come and stood on the threshold of the Drew dining room. Another room of many memories, of stern faces on the wall. A table was set with gleaming silver and white linen, and in its center stood a cake, on which fifty absurd pink candles flickered bravely.

There appeared to be no one in the room. On the other side of the table a French window stood open to the fog, and I went around to investigate. I had taken perhaps a dozen steps when I stopped, appalled.

Old Drew was lying on the carpet, and one yellow lean hand, always so adept at reaching out and seizing, held a corner of the white tablecloth. There was a dark stain on the left side of his dress coat; and when I pulled the coat back, I saw on the otherwise spotless linen underneath a great red circle that grew and grew. He was quite dead.

I stood erect, and for a dazed uncertain moment I stared about the room. Beside me, on the table, fifty yellow points of flame trembled like human things terrified at what they had seen.

IV

As I stood there with Henry Drew's dead body at my feet and those silly candles flaring wanly at my side, I heard the big clock in the hallway strike the half hour, and then the scurry of feet on the stairs. Cleared now of its first amazement, my mind was unusually keen. Henry Drew done for at last! By whom? Again my eye fell upon the open French window and, stepping to it, I looked out. My heart stopped beating-for amid the shadows and the fog I thought I saw a blacker shadow, which passed in the twinkling of an eye.

I stepped quickly from the room. The light from the window at my back penetrated a few feet only on a narrow veranda, from which steps led down into a garden, I judged. It was unexplored country to me, the dark was impenetrable, but I stepped off into tall damp grass almost to my knees.

The tule-fog seemed glad to have me back. Its clammy embrace was about my ankles; from the bare branches of the trees above, it dripped down on my defenseless head. I took several steps to the right, and ran into an unexpected ell of the house. As I stood there, uncertain which way to go, something brushed against my face, something rough, uncanny, that sent a shiver down my spine.