"I didn't look—didn't take time."
"Neither did I," young Webster added.
Hastings, disregarding the wet grass, was on his hands and knees, searching. He accomplished a complete circuit of the body, his round-shouldered, stooping figure making grotesque, elephantine shadows under the light of the torch as he moved about slowly, not trusting his eyes, but feeling with his hands every inch of the smallest, half-lit spaces.
Nobody else took part in the search. Having accepted his leadership from the outset, they seemed to take it for granted that he needed no help. Mentally benumbed by the horror of the tragedy, they stood there in the quiet, summer night, barren of ideas. They were like children, waiting to be instructed.
Hastings stood erect, pulling and hauling at his trousers.
"Can't find a knife or anything," he said. "Glad I can't. Hope he took it with him."
"Why?" asked Sloane, through chattering teeth.
"May help us to find him—may be a clue in the end."
He was silent a moment, squinting under the rims of his spectacles, looking down at the figure of the dead woman. He had already covered the face with the hat she had worn, a black straw sailor; but neither he nor the others found it easy to forget the peculiar and forbidding expression the features wore, even in death. It was partly fear, partly defiance—as if her last conscious thought had been a flitting look into the future, an exulting recognition of the certain consequences of the blow that had struck her down.
Put into words, it might have been: "You've murdered me, but you'll pay for it—terribly!"