The morning was thick. A still mist hung over the knolls. It was an ideal day for quiet and secret reconnoissance.
“This is our chance,” said Haynes after breakfast to Dick Colton and Professor Ravenden. “We’ll get the horses and ride out across the point. We may happen on something.”
The others readily agreed, and soon they had disappeared in the greyness. Their tacit purpose was to find some trace of the Wonderful Whalley. All the morning they rode, keeping a keen outlook from every hilltop, but without avail. They lunched late at First House and started back well along in the afternoon.
“He may be in any one of those thousand scrub-oak patches,” said Haynes as they remounted. “It’s like hunting a crook on the Bowery. This fog is thickening. Let’s hustle along.”
To hustle along was not so easy, for presently a fine rain came driving down, involving the whole world in a grey blur. For an hour the three circled about, lost. From the professor came the first suggestion:
“I believe that I hear the surf,” said he. “Guiding our course by the sound, we may gain the cliff, by following the line of which we easily should reach our destination.”
“Bravo, Professor!” said Haynes, and they made for the sea.
As they reached the crest of the sand-cliff some eighty feet above the beach, the rain ceased, a brisk puff of wind blew away the mist, and they found themselves a quarter of a mile west of Graveyard Point.
A short distance toward the point a steep gully debouched upon the shore, and a few rods out from its mouth the riders saw the body of a man stretched on the hard sand.
The face was hidden. Something in the huddled posture struck the eye with a shock as of violence. With every reason for assuming, at first sight, the body to have been washed up, they immediately felt that the man had not met death by the waves. Where they stood, the cliff fell too precipitously to admit of descent; but the ravine farther on offered easy access. Half-falling, half-slipping, they made their way down the abrupt declivity to the gully’s opening, which was partly blocked by a great boulder, and came upon a soft and pebbly beach, beyond which the hard clean level of sand stretched to the receding waves. As they reached the open a man appeared around the point to the eastward, sighted the body, and broke into a run. Haynes recognised him as Bruce, the Bow Hill station patrol, who had been on the cliff the night of the wreck. Dick Colton also started forward, but Haynes called to him: