And how had Rona, or anyone else for that matter, been able to get the better of such a man as Allen, fully armed and on the alert as I knew him to have been, and noted for his resourcefulness in emergency? That train of thought reminded me that we had found no arms on Allen when we released him. His right coat-pocket was empty, and so was the knife-sheath on his right hip. But his pocketbook, containing a considerable amount in notes, had not been taken.... It was all too much for my tired brain, which, ready enough to suggest questions, was quite incapable of grappling with them. When I drove into the home clearing I was wondering whether the broken glass I had noticed in the bottom of the cockpit was that from the whisky bottle Allen had told me Rona had thrown at him the morning Bell gave up the fight.
I was horribly tired, both in mind and body, and hoped that, with a glass or two of absinthe to relax my nerves, I might be able to sleep at least through the heat of the noonday. Shifting into my pajamas,--after telling Suey, my China boy, that I would not want lunch and not to disturb me until I sent for him,--I crawled under the mosquito-net and tried to drop off. But it was no use. No sooner would I begin to doze than the expiring images of my thoughts would shuffle up and sharpen with a steel-clicking suddenness into the dread likeness of The Face, with its dilated eyes boring me to the spine.
At the end of a couple of hours of fevered tossing, I gave it up, threw off my pajamas, stepped to the low back-window ledge and took a header into the cool green pool below. The Face dissolved as the thrill of the refreshing embrace of the water ran through my blood, but only to return when, after donning a fresh suit of drills, I began a restless pacing of the floor of the big living-room--my studio. Always it flashed a pace or two ahead of me, floating backward as I advanced upon it and swinging with me at the end of the room. I could not wheel swiftly enough to lose it, and it made no difference whether my eyes were opened or closed. I tried it both ways.
It was in the course of an experimental lap I was trying with my hands over my eyes that I bumped into the big rectangle of canvas I had prepared in advance against the day I should be ready to start work on "The Saving of the Black-birder." Ten seconds later I was pawing over my colours with feverish haste. The idea swimming in my head had crystallized. It was, in effect: _Put The Face on canvas and it will cease to haunt and harrow your mind_. That sounded reasonable. Certainly The Face couldn't be in two places at once, and if I once got it anchored to the canvas I could cover it up when I wanted to get away from it. It would all depend upon how faithfully I did my work, something told me. If the face on the canvas was a replica of the other to a hair, to a line, to the fear in the hell-haunted eyes, then the phantom face would enter into it and become subject to my control. If not--then I would never know sleep nor peace while I continued to live.