“I ain’t a-going to keep nothing back,” said Roper. “There is something else. Don’t ’ee forget as how I’d been keeping my feelings warm for Guy Markenmore for seven years! A man what’s been wronged as I had, he don’t forget easy. And when I gets to my cottage, all alone, that night, after I come in from Mitbourne, I sat a-thinking. And I did remember—’cause I hadn’t forgotten!—what Guy say to that chap he was with, about being on that footpath to Mitbourne at four o’clock next morning. So I gets up at three o’clock and sets off to meet him, intending, if I did find him up there, to have it out wi’ he—once for all!”
“Did you find him?” asked Blick quietly.
Roper glanced from the detective to the Professor.
“Aye!” he answered equally quietly. “I found him! But there’d been somebody there before me. He was warm, then—but dead enough, wi’ a bullet through the brain!”
The Professor gave a little sigh. But Blick showed no sign of surprise, and his voice, when he spoke, was more matter-of-fact than ever.
“It had happened, then, just before you got there?” he said. “See anybody about?”
Roper shook his head.
“When I found him,” he replied, “I made out as how he’d shoot his-self. But I looked close and sharp all about him, and I see there wasn’t no weapon—no pistol, revolver, nothing o’ that sort. Then I looks all round—I see nobody! It was grey morning, and you couldn’t see very far; there was mists amongst the spinneys and coppices, and curling along, the tops o’ the downs. No, I see nobody—’cepting hisself, dead.”
“Did you touch him?” enquired Blick suddenly.
A curiously dark look came over the woodman’s face, and now he looked, not at the detective, but at the Professor, as if he felt that in him he was secure of a certain sympathy and understanding.