The car leaped forward as the clutch took hold; dykes and trees swept down the road; and Criffell's bold ridge rose higher against the eastern sky. Here and there a loch gleamed palely in the desolate tableland, and in the distance a river caught the fading light, but the cloud-bank was spreading fast and the west getting dim. At last they saw from the top of a rise a gray haze stretched across a hollow, and Andrew told his comrade that it was the smoke of Dalbeattie. Then a man with a spade and barrow came into view on the slope of another hill, and Andrew asked Whitney to stop. The man was cutting back the grass edges on the roadside; he had not seen a bicycle of the kind they described.
"How long have you been here?" Andrew asked.
"Since seven o'clock this morning."
Whitney started the car slowly, and pulled up when the roadmender was hidden behind the hill.
"We want to talk this over," he said. "Williamson left the road between the station and where we met the man. We know he hasn't gone west or farther south. What about the east?"
Andrew glanced at Criffell, which rose between them and the sea. Its summit cut sharply against the sky, but its slopes were blurred and gray and the stone dykes that ran toward its foot had lost their continuity of outline. Two or three miles away, to the southeast, the mountain ran down in a long ridge.
"It's obvious that he hasn't gone over the top. He could cross the shoulder yonder, but he'd have some trouble."
"He'd have to leave the motorcycle."
"That's so," said Andrew thoughtfully. "There's an old road between here and the station and he might reach the moors by what we call a loaning—a green track that sometimes leads to a farm or cothouse and sometimes ends in a bog. Of course, if he found one and crossed the hill on foot, he'd cut the main road from Dumfries round the coast before he reached the Solway beach."
"You're taking it for granted that he'd try to make the beach—which means the wreck."