Stolid minds travel in grooves, and old Mrs. Guille's had been groping along possibilities of all kinds, clinging at the same time to the hope that Peter would still turn up all right.
Now that her hope was shattered her mind dropped naturally into a grim groove, along which it had taken a tentative trip during the morning and had recoiled from with a shudder.
The last time Mrs. Tom Hamon had come seeking a man who was missing, that man had been found under the Coupée, and so old Mrs. Guille set oft for the Coupée as fast as her old legs and her want of breath and general agitation would let her.
"Nom de Dieu! What—?" began Julie, with twisted black brows, and then drifted on with the rest in Mrs. Guille's wake—all except one or two housewives whose men were due for dinner, and knew they must be fed whatever had come to Peter Mauger.
"Gaderabotin!" said one of these as he came up, and stood scratching his head and gazing down the road after them. "What's taken them all?"
"Think because they found Tom Hamon there, they'll find Peter too," guffawed another, and they rolled on into their homes, chuckling at the simplicity of women and children.
Arrived at the Coupée, the little mob of sensation-seekers peered fearfully about. One small boy, cleverer or more groovy-minded than the rest, struck off along the headland to the left. It was from there Charles Guille had seen Tom Hamon. Perhaps from there he would see something, too.
And no sooner was he there, where he could see to the foot of the cliffs in Coupée Bay, than he commenced to dance and wave his arms like a mad thing, because the words he wanted to shout choked him tight so that he could hardly breathe.
They streamed out along the cliff and huddled there, struck chill with fright in spite of the blazing sun.
For there, under the cliff, in the same spot as they found Tom Hamon, lay another dark, huddled figure, and they knew it must be Peter.