The dust on the stone stairs was the accumulation of months, and bore not the faintest trace of footprints. It was obvious that no one had passed that way for a very long time.
Having thus exhausted the interior of the building, I now proceeded to search outside.
Skipper Jarvis declared that, when he and Bob Thomson went through the house on the night of the tragedy, they looked to every door and window, but all were properly secured, and unless Balfour had squeezed himself through a keyhole or a cranny, he could not have left the building. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the man must have got out in some way; otherwise, if he were dead, how was it we had failed to find his body in the house? So thorough had been the search that a dead mouse could not have escaped me.
There was still a great deal of snow on the ground, especially in the hollows and ravines; but it was soft and slushy owing to the rise in temperature.
Aided by half a dozen men—mostly gamekeepers—and several dogs, we commenced systematically to examine the grounds, the country round about, the burns, the woods, but all to no purpose. Every inch of Braid Glen was gone over; what is now the Waverley curling pond was dragged; the Jordan and Braid streams examined; all the quarries in the neighbourhood—of which there are many—were looked into; the Braid Hill and all round about the Braid Hill was paced; but the result was the same. Raymond Balfour was not found.
When our failure became known, the excitement increased greatly, especially amongst ignorant and stupid people, who stoutly maintained that the master of Corbie Hall had been spirited away by the Evil One, who had also killed Maggie Stiven. These good folks failed to explain why the Evil One should have stabbed Maggie with a stiletto, and have left more than half the blade in the wound, when he might have deprived her of life so much more easily. I found that even Captain Jarvis was not without some belief in this absurd theory.
‘If there is not something uncanny about the whole business, how is it you have failed to get trace of the man?’ asked Jarvis, with the air of one who felt he was putting a poser which was absolutely unanswerable. ‘You see,’ pursued the skipper, with an insistency of tone that was very amusing—‘you see, we were a bad lot. We’d just come there for an orgie, and the meat and drink that we wasted would have kept many poor wretches from starving on that awful night.’
‘Do you consider that Raymond Balfour was an exceptionally wicked man?’ I asked Jarvis.
‘Well, no,’ he answered seriously; ‘I shouldn’t like to say that. But he was a wild fellow.’
‘What do you mean by wild?’