"Crumbs!" cried Seth. "Why, it's the same brand as those we found in the silver cigarette-case—marked 'Vafiadi, Cairo'! I wonder if the stranger was Herr Hilliger?"
"That's just what I was wondering, too," nodded Mark. "It's possible."
Mr. Croucher stared at the two Scouts indignantly.
"Do you suppose I shouldn't have known him?" he demanded. "Herr Hilliger wears a beard and has long hair. This man was clean-shaven, and his hair was quite short. Besides——"
"It wouldn't be impossible to shave off a beard and get a short crop," declared Mark. "Which way did he go?"
Mr. Croucher indicated the direction. The two Scouts went off hurriedly. Mark led the way across the warren to the Alderwick road and the little cross lane.
"It was just here that we captured Seligmann," he explained.
They searched the ground and discovered in the soft mud the newly impressed marks of the tyres of a motor-car and of a man's boots.
It was useless, of course, for them to attempt to track the car. Had they been able to do so, the trail would have led them many miles away, through village after village and town after town, northward along the coast. They might have run the car to earth at last on a desolate stretch of moorland where it had halted. Thence they might have followed Heinrich Hilliger's tracks to a pile of ruins—the ruins of an old-world castle—on the edge of a steep precipice overlooking the sea.
At the foot of the precipice was a tiny bay of deep, clear water, fringed with rocks. Between two of the rocks a small boat was drawn up on the shingle—a curious, collapsible boat made of water-tight canvas stretched on a steel frame. A pair of sculls lay across the thwarts. Nobody was in charge of it.