The next minute the boat returned, and her prow struck the bank.
“Well?” said Sir Murray, eagerly, for the men were alone.
“He’s gone, sir,” said the groom, solemnly. “The piles are very slippery, and the poor fellow, whoever he was, could hold on no longer. We’ve been feeling about with the sculls, but we can’t find him.”
Again that rushing of blood to the head and the choking sensation, and Sir Murray Gernon gasped for air, as he staggered about like a drunken man.
Could it be possible? Was it Norton, and was he removed from his path?—removed by his own act while engaged in some nefarious scheme?
For a few moments a strange sense of mingled exultation and horror oppressed the baronet, and he stood staring vacantly in the faces of his servants.
Would he like them to go and try again? though, as the water was so deep, there was not much chance of finding the poor fellow till morning.
Yes, he would like them to go; and he would come with them himself; and, entering the boat, Sir Murray made the weary men row on and on, backwards and forwards, through the two openings of the wooden bridge, as, armed himself with the weed-grapnel in the prow, he dragged it over the same ground again and again, expecting at each check it received that it was hooked in the body of the man whom he looked upon as the blight of his existence.
At length, the men being completely worn out, the search was given up till daylight, and Sir Murray returned to the Castle, to find McCray sitting up in bed with a blanket round him, sipping whisky and water, hot and strong.
“Gude sake, Sir Mooray!” he exclaimed, as his master entered. “We won the day. I ken a’ aboot it—how ye shot one and took the ither; and Jock Gurdon’s coming round—the villin!—and no more dead than I am. But it had got verra close to the end, Sir Mooray.”