"What's the trouble? Is that you Hall?"
"He's dead! He's got a knife in his heart!" gasped the postman, who was clinging to the fence and feeling sick.
Jervis suddenly loomed hugely out of the fog, and entered into the circle of blurred light cast by the street-lamp. "Who is dead?" he asked, in surprise.
"Sir Hector Wyke," babbled Hall, whose nerves were very much shaken. "I saw him lying dead. Mrs. Vence showed me his corpse. My bicycle is gone----"
"Gone!" Jervis shook the terrified man. "Why I saw your bicycle slip along under the lamp nigh which we were talking on the esplanade. I come here straight when I hear your voice, wondering why you should be in the Ladysmith Road and your bicycle----"
"It was the murderer, Jervis. He dashed past me when I stopped at the door yonder to deliver the letter you saw. He has taken my bicycle. Stop him. He ought to be hanged. Oh, oh, oh!" He broke down, shivering and crying.
"Don't be a fool. Pull yourself together," commanded Jervis, gruffly. "How can I follow in this fog, and with no machine to catch him up with? Go to the telegraph-office, and wire Sergeant Purse at Redleigh that a murder has been committed at Maranatha, and that the criminal has escaped on a Government machine. He can't go far on a red-painted bicycle without being captured, though the fog may help him to win clear. Off with you, Hall, and I'll go into the house."
Hall nodded feebly, "I always thought that there was something strange about the baronet."
"We ain't got time to talk about the bar'nit. You go and do what I tell you."
Thus commanded, the postman, whose nerves were all unstrung by the sight he had seen and the tragedy which had occurred, crawled slowly down the road into the misty darkness, clinging to the fence to aid his progress. Jervis listened for a minute or so until the footfalls of his messenger had died away, then assumed an official expression of stern determination, and strode up the weedy path.