“How do you account for Florey’s body not being found in the lagoon?” Marten asked quietly.
“I can’t account for it. We might have missed it—I don’t see how we could, but we might have done so. I’m going to have men dragging the lagoon all day, over and over again—until we find both bodies.”
“You are convinced that Nealman, too, lies dead in the lagoon?”
“Where else could he be? Did you hear that cry a few hours ago?”
“Good Heavens! Could I ever forget it? My old friend——”
“Was it faked? Could any man have faked a cry like that?”
“Heavens, no! It had the fear and the agony of death right in it. There can’t be any hope of that, Slatterly.”
The sheriff gazed about the little circle of white faces. No one dissented. That cry was real, and there had been tragic need and extremity behind it: we knew that fact if we knew that we lived. Evidently the sheriff had completely given over the theory that he had suggested, half-heartedly, to me—that Nealman might have cried out to hide the fact of his own suicide.
“No man could have cried out like that to deceive, and then disappear. No, Mr. Marten, the man that gave that cry is dead, in all probability in the lagoon, and there seems no doubt but that Nealman was the man.”