"Come out of where?"
"Wherever he's got to."
"That's Guernsey, most likely. His friends have arranged to lift him off here first chance that came; and it came before we did, and you'll not see him in these parts again, I warrant you."
"I'll wait with you, John, if you're set on it, though I doubt Tom's right, and the man's gone," said Peter Vaudin of La Ville. And John Drillot found himself bound to the adventure.
"Do we keep the boat?" asked Vaudin.
"No ... for then one of us must sit in her all night, or she will bump herself to pieces. You will come back for us in the morning, Philip."
"I'll come," said Philip Guille, and presently they stood watching the boats pulling lustily homewards, and devoutly wishing they were in them.
Every foot of the rock, as they knew it, had already been carefully raked over. The possible hiding-places were few. But no one knows better than a Sark man what rocks can do in the way of slits and tunnels and caves, and it was just this possibility that had set John Drillot to his unwonted, and none too welcome, task. The murderer—as he deemed Gard—might have found some place unknown to any of them, and might be lying quietly waiting for them to go. If that was so, he must come out sooner or later, and the chances were that he would steal out in the night.
So the two watchers prowled desultorily about the rock, poking again into every place that suggested possible concealment for anything larger than a puffin. There might be openings in the rifted basement rocks which only the full ebb would discover, and these might lead up into chambers where a man could lie high and dry till the tide allowed him out again. And so they hung precariously over the waves and poked and peered, and found nothing.
They had clambered over the great wall more than once before Vaudin said: "G'zamin, John, I wonder if there's any holes here big enough to take a man?"