As when a flash of lightning lights all the landscape up and shows the traveller dreadful dangers that beset his path, so a wave of intuition told Dunn clearly the whole conspiracy; so that he saw it all, and saw how every detail was to be fitted in together. His father, General Dunsmore, was to be murdered first at the Brook Bourne Spring, to which he was being lured; and afterwards, when Dunn arrived, he was to be murdered, too. And on him, dead and unable to defend himself, the blame of his father's death would be laid. It would not be difficult to manage. Walter would arrange it all as neatly as he had been accustomed to arrange the Dunsmore business affairs placed in his hands for settlement.
A forged letter or two, Dunn's own revolver used to shoot the old man with and then placed in Dunn's dead hand when his own turn had come, convincing detail like that would be easy to arrange. Why, the very fact of his disguise, the tangled beard that he had grown to hide his features with, would appear conclusive. Any coroner's jury would return a verdict of wilful murder against his memory on that one fact alone.
Walter would see to that all right. A little false evidence apparently reluctantly given would be added, and all would be kneaded together into the one substance till the whole guilt of all that happened would appear to lie solely on his shoulders.
As for motive, it would simply be put forward that he had been in a hurry to succeed his uncle. And very likely some tale of a quarrel with his father or something of that sort would be invented, and would go uncontradicted since there would be no one to contradict it.
And most probably what was contemplated at Wreste Abbey was no ordinary burglary, but the assassination of old Lord Chobham, of which the guilt would also be set down to him.
Very clearly now he realized that this tremendous plot was aimed, not only at life, but at honour—that not only was his life required, but also that he should be thought a murderer.
With the realization of the danger that threatened at Wreste Abbey he turned and began to run back in the direction where it lay, that he might take timely warning there, but he did not run a dozen strides when he remembered Ella again, and paused.
Surely he must think of her first, alone and unprotected. For she was the woman he loved; and besides, she had summoned him to her help, and then she was a woman, and at least, the others were men.
All this flood of thoughts, this intuitive grasping of a situation terrible beyond conception, almost unparalleled in bloody and dreadful horror, passed through his mind with extreme rapidity.
Once more he turned and began to run—to run as he had never run before, for now he saw that all depended on the speed with which he could cover the eight miles that lay between him and Ottam's Wood, whether he could still save his father or not.