stillness. Suddenly he bethought him of the secret chamber, and with
a wild prayer that his loved ones had been able to reach it in
safety, and were still in hiding there, he started down the narrow
stairs in search. Reaching the bottom, he found that the door had
been wrenched from its hinges and thrown to the ground; and then
Guir's heart sank, never to rise again. Stepping across the threshold
of the room, candle in hand, a vision of blood swam before his eyes,
and the dimly-burning light revealed the horror-stricken faces of his
murdered family. Not one was left to tell the tale, but the story
pictured before him was unmistakable in every detail. The treacherous
natives had first tortured and then butchered them. For a time he
stood transfixed with horror, unable to remove his eyes from the
awful scene, or his feet from the spot where he had first beheld it;
then, with the cry of sudden madness, he threw himself beside the
bleeding corpses and lost all consciousness. How long he remained
there was problematical, but on awaking Guir was still in the dark,
and where he had fallen. At that moment a strange and overpowering
desire seized him. He must paint the portraits of his murdered family
before it became too late. Had he been sane, such a ghastly thought
would never have possessed him; but Guir was crazed, and for days and
nights following he worked in that dismal vault, by the light of a
smoking lamp, at the task he had set himself, his fired imagination
even intensifying the horrors of the grewsome tableau.

"Upon each canvas he depicted the awful countenance which fact and
fancy had imprinted upon his brain. Guir painted not only what he
saw, but what he imagined he saw--dreadful faces, loaded with torture
and despair. When completed, he hung them upon the walls of the room,
and then with his own hands bricked up the entrance from within,
having first carefully replaced and bolted the door. When Guir had