"He has taken no little trouble to prove his alibi, even before any proof was asked, and evidently began the affair cunningly enough. He rode here by the way of Neuenhof, Lankenitz, and Faschwitz--that is a fact; the people in the villages heard him dash through; he even took time to talk to several persons he met. If he rode the whole way he cannot have been present at the time the deed was committed; even the best rider on the fastest horse could not do that. But suppose he did not ride the whole way--suppose he turned into the road just above Neuenhof--suppose the spectral horseman whom you saw in your vision dashing across the morass had been a veritable rider of flesh and blood, and this rider had been Carl Brandow.
"You say that is impossible. What is impossible to a man pursued by the furies, if he has a horse under him like the much-praised Brownlock?
"Brandow rode Brownlock that night; the groom at the Fürstenhof swore it, after he saw the racer, day before yesterday, on his way to Sundin. And when a man like Brandow rides a horse which in itself represents a small fortune, and on which, moreover, he has bet thousands, on such a night, over such roads, at such a pace, he must have been in a great hurry.
"He must have been in a very great hurry, or, my dear friend, you would not have escaped with your life; you certainly would not have been spared. A man whom people dash headlong over a precipice sixty feet high they silence entirely, if they are not in too great a hurry.
"Yet, as I said before, this will probably remain a mystery, even to a wiser judge than Justizrath von Zadenig. One of those who were there will never betray it, and the other can no longer do so.
"As I returned from B. I met Brandow; he may easily have learned from my coachman that I had been talking to the Justizrath for an hour. He rode towards home at full gallop; an hour after the lawyer arrived with the gendarme, but did not find Hinrich Scheel, although people had seen him about all the forenoon; and he even took his master's horse when he came home. The master was very, very anxious that the missing man should be found; he even directed the search himself; he--"
"I will not protract this horrible supposition farther; it is the only one which occurs in my story, all the others are facts--facts which cry aloud to heaven--which ought not, must not remain unpunished. I know, my dearest friend, you'll think as I do, though every fibre of your heart must quiver at the thought that you--you--
"I shall come to Sundin with my wife day after to-morrow. We will then discuss, not what is to be done--there can be no doubt about that; but the how is certainly to be considered."
Gotthold put the letter back in his pocket, and gazed out into the cheerless, rain-blurred landscape so fixedly, that he scarcely heard a carriage, which, coming from Prora, passed by on the other side of the road. It was still a half hour's ride to Prora, but it seemed an eternity to the impatient traveller. At last the carriage stopped before Wollnow's house.