It was anything but a simple route along which the dog led them; for it seemed to wind backwards and forwards almost at haphazard.
“Nobody who knew the Maze would have tried to get out this way,” Stenness commented at last.
His remark was hardly needed; for already the dog had more than once halted in the middle of an open alley and then retraced its course for no obvious reason. It was Howard Torrance who saw the meaning of these intricate tracings before the remainder of the party.
“Of course!” he explained. “The murderer didn’t go straight out of the Maze immediately. Probably he found Miss Forrest and myself blocking the road again and again as we wandered about. And he’d got to avoid being seen by us. That’s why he had to turn and wind about like this.”
At last the dog led them to the edge of the Maze, passed out through the iron gate, and went on eagerly across the grass. The track had brought them to the river side of the labyrinth, where a tiny clump of trees had been planted; and into this the dog plunged. A few paces further on it halted for a moment at the foot of a tree.
“Perhaps he climbed that,” Wendover suggested, going up and examining the trunk. “Look! There’s a faint mark here on the trunk, just about the height that a man could reach with his foot.”
Sir Clinton examined the mark, which was very slight indeed. Then he looked at the dog, which had set off in a fresh direction.
“I suppose he must have got tired of the view and come down again, in that case. One usually does come down. One rarely climbs higher than the top.”
He set off after the dog, which was now making for the road running past the Maze. But here it seemed to go astray. It snuffed about with the utmost eagerness, casting wider and wider in its attempt to recapture the scent; but soon it was clear that it had lost the track. Sir Clinton took it back to the tree once more and allowed it to start afresh. This time he followed closely on its track; and his companions noticed that he had pulled some paper from his pocket and was scattering tiny fragments on the grass to mark the animal’s route. But this attempt also ended in failure. Beyond the road, the trail seemed to be lost.
“We may as well give it up,” Sir Clinton admitted. “One can’t expect infallibility from a dumb animal.”