Still he cannot think of what they are after, though he has his suspicions; the place, with something only known to himself, suggesting them—conjecture at first soon becoming certainty, as he sees the ex-officer of Hussars rise to his feet, hold his lamp close to the cliff’s face, and inspect the abrasions on the rock!
He is not more certain, but only more apprehensive, when the crushed juniper twigs are taken in hand, examined, and let go again. For he has by this divined the object of it all.
If any doubt lingered, it is set at rest by the exclamatory words following, which, though but muttered, reach him on the cliff above, heard clear enough—
“No accident—no suicide—murdered!” They carry tremor to his heart, making him feel as a fox that hears the tongue of hound on its track. Still distant, but for all causing it fear, and driving it to think of subterfuge.
And of this thinks he, as he lies with his face among the ferns; ponders upon it till the boat has passed back up the dark passage out into the river, and he hears the last light dipping of its oars in the far distance.
He even forgets a woman, for whom he was waiting at the summer-house, and who there without finding him has flitted off again.
At length rising to his feet, and going a little way, he too gets into a boat—one he finds, with oars aboard, down in the dock. It is not the Gwendoline—she is gone.
Seating himself on the mid thwart, he takes up the oars, and pulls towards the place lately occupied by the skiff of the waterman. When inside the cove he lights a match, and holds it close to the face of the rock where Ryecroft held his lamp. It burns out and he draws a second across the sand paper; this to show him the broken branches of the juniper, which he also takes in hand and examines. Soon also dropping them, with a look of surprise, followed by the exclamatory phrases—
“Prodigiously strange! I see his drift now. Cunning fellow! On the track he has discovered the trick, and ’twill need another trick to throw him off it. This bush must be uprooted—destroyed.”
He is in the act of grasping the juniper to pluck it out by the roots. A dwarf thing, this could be easily done. But a thought stays him—another precautionary forecast, as evinced by his words—