‘He has, I think, done us a great service,’ Merton repeated; and the girl’s colour returned to her beautiful face, that had been of marble.
‘Yet there are untoward circumstances,’ Merton admitted. ‘I wish to ask you two or three questions. I must give you my word of honour that I have no intention of injuring your father. The reverse; I am really acting in his interests. Now, first, he has practised in Australia. May I ask if he was interested in the Aborigines?’
‘Yes, very much,’ said the girl, entirely puzzled. ‘But,’ she added, ‘he was never in the Labour trade.’
‘Blackbird catching?’ said Merton. ‘No. But he had, perhaps, a collection of native arms and implements?’
‘Yes; a very fine one.’
‘Among them were, perhaps, some curious native
shoes, made of emu’s feathers—they are called Interlinia or, by white men, Kurdaitcha shoes?’
‘I don’t remember the name,’ said Miss Markham, ‘but he had quite a number of them. The natives wear them to conceal their tracks when they go on a revenge party.’
Merton’s guess was now a certainty. The marquis had spoken of Miss Markham’s father as a ‘landlouping’ Australian doctor. The footmarks of the feathered shoes in the snow at Kirkburn proved that an article which only an Australian (or an anthropologist) was likely to know of had been used by the body-snatchers.
Merton reflected. Should he ask the girl whether she had told her father what, on the night of the marquis’s appearance at the office, Logan had told her? He decided that this was superfluous; of course she had told her father, and the doctor had taken his measures (and the body of the marquis) accordingly. To ask a question would only be to enlighten the girl.