In the early morning of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one, three arsonists — shadows in the night -- arrive at Lahardane, the home of Captain Everard Gault, his wife, Heloise, and daughter, Lucy. The sheepdogs that alarmed the Gaults of previous trespasses had since been poisoned. On this occasion, though, it is a warning shot fired above the silhouetted heads that sends them retreating, saving the estate from being set ablaze. But blood speckles the pebbles of the approach in the dawn’s light, implying that the Captain’s single shot wounded one of the intruders.