"I know, sir," the man interrupted, with a little moan. "Please don't!"
Tallente shrugged his shoulders.
"I took him at no disadvantage," he said coolly. "He knew how to use the gloves and he was twenty years younger than I. However, there it is. Backwards he went, all legs and arms and shrieks. And with him went the papers he had stolen.—At twelve o'clock to-night, Robert, I must go down after him."
"It's impossible, sir! It's a sheer precipice for four hundred feet!"
"Nothing of the sort," was the cool reply. "There are heaps of ledges and little clumps of pines and yews. All that you will have to do is to pull up the rope when I am ready. You can fasten it to a tree when I go down."
"It's not worth it, sir," the man protested anxiously. "No one will ever find the body down there."
"Send the boy home to stay with his parents to-night," Tallente continued. "Your wife, I suppose, can be trusted?"
"She is living up at the garage, sir," Robert answered. "Besides, she is deaf. I'll tell her that I am sleeping in the house to-night as you are not very well. And forgive me, sir—her ladyship left a message. She hoped you would lunch with her to-morrow."
Tallente strolled out again in a few minutes, curiously impatient of the restraint of walls, and clambered up the precipitous field at the back of the Manor. Far up the winding road which led back into the world, a motor-car was crawling on its way up over. He watched it through a pair of field glasses. Leaning back in the tonneau with folded arms, as though solemnly digesting a problem, was Inspector Gillian. Tallente closed the glasses with a little snap and smiled.
"The Bucket type," he murmured to himself, "very much the Bucket type."