The bit of ground it had covered had been disturbed.
In a moment, digging with his naked hand, he had unearthed a flat, morocco leather-covered box. He opened it, it was a jewel case and empty. Upon the silk lining of the cover was the name and address:
“Smith and Wilkinson, Regent Street.”
Smith and Wilkinson, Sir Anthony Gyde’s jewellers.
He unearthed another box, and yet another.
The sweat stood out in beads upon his forehead.
There was something in the Gyde case that affected him as he had never been affected before. Perhaps it was some effluence from the obscure and diabolical mind with which he felt himself at war; perhaps it was the extraordinary intricacies of the pursuit, and the foreknowledge that the creature against whom he had pitted himself was at once a demon, a genius and a madman. Perhaps it was on account of all these reasons that, when he unearthed these recent traces, his soul turned in him and a furious hunger and hatred filled his heart.
The hound hates the thing he is pursuing. The lion hates the buck. All hunting is an act of vengeance; not for food alone does the pursuer chase the pursued, but from some old antipathy begotten when the world was young.
At times Freyberger, in his unravelling of the Gyde case, was seized by an overmastering desire to have his hands upon the creature he was pursuing and to drag him to his death.
It is one of the laws of mind that the ferocity of the pursuer increases at each double and shift of the pursued.