"Queer!" said the detective, as he stood staring meditatively at patens and chalices, reliquaries and pyxes. "All these, I reckon, are sacred things, consecrated and all that, and yet ever since that Reformation time, they've been mixed up with robbery, and now at last with wholesale murder! Odd, isn't it? However, there they are!—and here," he added, pulling the parchment schedules out of his pocket which he had discovered at Baxter's old lodgings in Blyth, and handing them to the lieutenant, "here is the list of what there ought to be; you'll take all this in charge, of course—I don't know if it comes within the law of treasure trove or not, but as the original owners are dust and ashes four hundred years ago, I should say it does—anyway, the Crown solicitors'll soon settle that point."
We went off from the yawl, the three of us, in the boat which had brought Lorrimore and me aboard her. The group on shore saw us making for the point whereat the escaping figure had landed in the early morning, and followed us thither along the beach. They came up to us as we stepped ashore, and while Lorrimore began giving Mr. Raven an account of what we had found on the yawl I drew his niece aside.
"You had better know the worst in a word," I said. "We were more than fortunate in getting away from the yawl as we did. Don't be upset—there isn't a man alive on that thing!"
"Baxter?" she exclaimed.
"I said—not one!" I answered. "Wholesale! Don't think about it—as for me, I wish I'd never seen it. But now it's a question of a living man—Wing."
"Then it was as I thought?" she asked. "Wing was there?"
"Lorrimore is sure of it—he found a cap of Wing's in the galley," said I. "And as Wing isn't amongst the dead, he's the man who escaped."
Scarterfield came up, the local policeman with him who had joined Mr. Raven's search-party as it came across country.
"Whereabouts did this man land, Middlebrook?" he asked. "You saw him, you and Miss Raven, didn't you?"
"We saw him round these rocks," I replied. "But then they hid him from us—we couldn't see exactly. Somewhere on the other side of them, anyway."