Chirk got up with a jerk. “Look’ee here, Soldier—! What’s in your noddle, for God’s sake?”
“Where is he?” said John significantly. “Why did the news that Brean had gone away alarm Henry Stornaway so much? Why did Henry come here the night before last? And what did he find here to make him look as though he had seen a ghost?”
Chirk passed his tongue between his lips, and cast a staring look about him. “Maybe—we’d do well to search a bit more!” he said, a trifle thickly. He gave a shiver. “God, I’ll be glad to be out of this place!”
The light from John’s lantern was being cast on to the ground, slowly moving in a wide arc. “If he was surprised here—and killed here, there should be some sign of it.”
“There was no call to kill him!”
“There may have been a fight.”
“Ay, likely enough!” Chirk said, after a moment. “He’d have fought, Ned would.” He said no more, and for a few minutes only the rushing noise of water, which seemed to come from deep within the hill, broke the silence. Then the Captain’s lantern was lowered, and he knelt, keenly inspecting the ground. Chirk, who had been searching along one of the walls, saw, and trod quickly over to his side. The Captain pressed the palm of one hand on the ground, and lifted it, and held it in the light.
Chirk swallowed audibly, and said in a rough voice: “Where did they put him? We got to find him, Soldier!”
“Follow the bloodstains,” John replied, rising and moving forward, his eyes fixed to the ground. “He bled a great deal, Chirk. There was a sticky pool of it where I laid my hand. This looks like some more of it.” He stooped again. “Yes. And here!”
“Going towards that other passage you saw,” Chirk said. “I’m for trying that way: they wouldn’t have left him here, and the chests being here no one had any call to go farther.”