"Perhaps you thought it was I whom you met at the inn?"
"No! because the man I met at the inn is dead. Besides, he had a wound on his right hand, and you have not."
"It's a queer business altogether," said Briarfield, walking to and fro. "I cannot but agree with your idea of hallucination."
"I tell you it is too real for hallucination."
"Then how can you explain it?" he demanded sharply, pausing before me.
"I can't explain it!" I replied helplessly.
"If you had discovered the corpse when you returned to the inn, there might be some chance of solving the mystery. But you admit there was no corpse there!"
"Not the vestige of one."
"Then that proves the thing to be hallucination," he said triumphantly. "If the man was murdered, who would take the trouble to remove the corpse?"
"Strent might have done so to conceal the evidence of his crime."