“What’s that thing?” he said, pointing to the nearest unsheltered print. “My God! It looks like a bird track. And it leads straight to the body!” he cried in a voice that jangled on Haynes’ nerves. But when he began to look fearfully overhead, into the gathering darkness, drawing in his shoulders like one shrinking from a blow, that was too much.
Haynes jumped up, grabbed him by the arm and started him along.
“Don’t be a fool!” he said. “Keep this to yourself. I won’t have a lot of idiots prowling around those tracks. Understand? You’re to report this murder, and say nothing about what you don’t know. Later we’ll take it up again.”
The man seemed stunned. He walked along quietly, close to his companion, to whom it was no comfort to feel him, now and again, shaken by a violent shudder. They had nearly reached the station, when Professor Ravenden and Colton came down to the beach in front of them. Colton had nothing to tell. The professor reported having started up a fine specimen of sky-blue butterfly, which led him astray. This went to show, he observed, that a man never should venture out lacking his net.
“Whalley might have bumped into him, and he probably wouldn’t have noticed it,” remarked Haynes aside to Colton. “It takes something really important, like a bug, to attract the scientific notice. A mere murderer doesn’t count.”
“Then you’ve found evidence against the juggler?” asked Colton eagerly.
“I’ve found nothing,” returned the reporter, “that’s any clearer than a bucket of mud.”
He refused to say anything more until they were close to the station. Then he tested a hopeless theory.
“The man wasn’t stabbed; he was shot,” he observed.
“What’s the use?” said Colton. “You know that’s no bullet wound. You’ve seen the same thing twice before, not counting the sheep, and you ought to know. The bullet was never cast that could open such a gap in a man’s head. It was a broad-bladed, sharp instrument with power behind it.”