The Man from the Clouds

by J. Storer Clouston

I took refuge in an ultra-Hobhousian explanation of how I had been there myself a few days ago, and it had struck me as a very murderous looking place, and then I asked,

"Is anything more known, doctor?"

"No," he answered, and then added abruptly and with unusual energy,
"This is absolutely damnable!"

He walked out of the room again as he spoke, and I was left to my thoughts. I went into the smoking room but forgot to light my pipe. With my head in my hands I bent over the fire and tried in the first place to grasp this second tragedy, and then to piece things together and see some sequence in them.

That Bolton had really been on the right scent now seemed highly probable, though as he made no concealment of his business, it was possible that an agency which had tried to murder me, defied all efforts to check it for months, and to all seeming had lately blown up a cruiser, might get rid of him simply on general principles. Still, the working hypothesis must be that he had got on to their track. And, oh, if he had only told me what he had discovered! But that secret had died with him, and now once more one must begin all over again.

Yet this time I had secured one significant-looking starting point. The coincidence of Jock's appearance out at that lonely place more or less about the time when the murder must have taken place, and his leading me away in another direction from that in which I was heading, was certainly suggestive. The creature had exhibited more appearance of intelligence than I had given him credit for, and might he not then be used by some one who knew him well and had strong influence over him, to play such a simple part as he had acted? Supposing he were with such a person and that person saw me coming and did not wish me to spy him, how easy it would be to say, "Go, Jock, and show that gentleman stones over there!"

As to whom to suspect of having such influence over him, that was easy enough. I recalled young Peter Scollay's stare and laugh when I suggested that they were going to look at the ship, and it sounded to me now a very sinister laugh.

And yet the more I thought over all this, the more objections I saw. In the first place the body was not found where I had seen Jock. True, it might have been moved if the murderer had been wily and suspicious enough to think that the simple Mr. Hobhouse was capable of connecting the harmless episode of the stones with his gruesome work, though even that seemed to imply more than was likely; but a more formidable difficulty was the evidence of educated cunning in every crime committed or attempted by that hand. For "that hand" I decided I must certainly substitute "those hands." I had always thought there was more than one in it, and now I felt surer of this than ever.

With the back of my head, as they say, I heard Dr. Rendall go into dinner and then come out again into the hall, and then I heard him, instead of coming into the smoking room, open and shut the front door. He had evidently gone out again and I was not sorry to be left alone.

A little later, in the same absent-minded way, I heard the front door bell faintly ring and I only woke out of my reverie when the smoking room door opened.