He led the way up the beach again.
“Reminds one a bit of Sam Lloyd's ‘Get off the Earth’ puzzle, doesn't it?” he suggested, when they came back to the point where the three tracks met. “You can count your three men all right, and then—flick!—there are only two. How do you account for it, squire?”
Wendover scrutinised the tracks minutely.
“There's been no struggle, anyhow,” he affirmed. “The final tracks of Fordingbridge are quite clear enough to show that. So he must have gone voluntarily, wherever he went to.”
“And you explain his going—how?”
Wendover reflected for a moment or two before answering.
“Let's take every possibility into account,” he said, as his eyes ranged over the sand. “First of all, he didn't sink into the sand in any normal way, for the surface isn't disturbed. Secondly, he didn't walk away, or he'd have left tracks. That leaves only the possibility that he went off through the air.”
“I like this pseudo-mathematical kind of reasoning, squire. It sounds so convincing,” Sir Clinton commented. “Go ahead. You never fail to combine interest with charm in your expositions.”
Wendover seemed untouched by the warmth of this tribute.
“If he went off through the air, he must have managed it either by himself or with the help of the other two; that's self-evident. Now it's too far for him to have jumped backwards on to the wreck and climbed up it; we can rule that out. And it's hardly likely that he was enough of a D. D. Home to manage a feat of levitation and sail up into the air off his own bat. So that excludes the notion that he vanished completely, without any extraneous assistance, doesn't it?”