There was little talking in any of the boats, but there was some solid hard thinking, in a mazed kind of way.
Until they knew more of the facts, indeed, they scarce knew what to think yet. But more than one of them remembered disturbedly how they had gone in force two days before to fetch Gard off his lonely rock, or to make an end of him there; and here they were going in force on a very different errand—an errand which, they could not help seeing, would bring him off his rock in a very different way, if this present matter was what it looked as if it might be.
And the Doctor was not long in giving them the facts, when they had run up on to the shingle, and then crunched through it to the place where Peter's body lay under the steep black cliff—in the exact spot where Tom Hamon's had lain just eighteen days before.
But that it was undoubtedly Peter's face and body, those who had come after Tom the last time might have thought they were going through their previous experience over again. It was all so like.
They all stood round in a dark, silent group while the Doctor carefully examined the body, and the Sénéchal looked on with stern and troubled face.
"It is most extraordinary," said the Doctor, straightening up from his task at last, and his face, too, was knitted with perplexity, but had something else in it besides. "This man has been done to death in exactly the same way as Hamon"—a rustle of surprise shook the group of silent onlookers. "The head has been beaten in just as Hamon's was—with some blunt rounded tool, I should say. These other wounds and contusions are the results of his fall down the cliff. He has been dead at least eight hours. Lift him carefully, men. We can do nothing more here—unless by chance the one who did it flung his weapon after him, and we could find it."
They scattered, and searched the whole dark bay minutely, but found nothing. Then with rough gentleness they bore the body to the boat and laid it under the thwarts.
"Men!" said the Sénéchal weightily, as they were just about to climb back into their boats. "This matter brings another matter home to all our hearts. You have been persecuting another man under the belief that he killed Tom Hamon. From what some of us knew of Mr. Gard, we were certain he could have had no hand in it. This, I take it, proves it?" He looked at the Doctor.
"Undoubtedly!" nodded the Doctor. "The man who killed this one killed the other, and that man could not be Stephen Gard, for he is on L'Etat."
"It's God's mercy that you haven't Mr. Gard's blood on your heads. Some of you, I know, have done your best that way. Suppose you had killed him that other night—what would you have felt as you stood here to-day? Take that thought home with you, and may God keep you from like misjudgment in the future!"