Still frowning, Professor Kent suffered himself to be led to the spot. Two or three of the group, as it parted before him, greeted him. He found himself looking down on a corpse clad in a dark silk dress and stretched on a wooden grating, to which it was lashed with a small rope. Everything about the body indicated wealth. The dress was expensively made. The shoes were of the best type, and the stockings were silk. The head was marred by a frightful bruise which had crushed in the right side and extended around behind the ear. Blood had clotted thickly in the short close-curled hair. The left side was unmarked. The eyes were closed and the mouth was slightly open, showing a glint of gold amid very white and regular teeth. An expression of deadly terror distorted the face. Professor Kent bent closely over it.
“That’s strange; very strange,” he murmured. “It should be peaceful.”
“But look at the hand!” cried Jarvis.
Here, indeed, was the astounding feature of the tragedy; the aspect that brought Kent to his knees, the more closely to observe. The body lay twisted slightly to the right, with the left arm extended. The left wrist was enclosed in a light rusted handcuff to which a chain was fastened. At the end of the chain was the companion cuff, shattered, evidently by a powerful blow, and half buried in the sand. As Kent leaned over the corpse, a fat, powerful, grizzled man with a metal badge on his shirt-front pushed forward.
“Them’s cast-iron cuffs,” he announced. “That kind ain’t been used these forty years.”
“What kind of a ship ’ud be carryin’ ’em nowadays?” asked some one in the crowd.
“An’ what kind of a seaman’d be putting of ’em on a lady’s wrists?” growled a formidable voice, which Kent, looking up, perceived to have come from amid a growth of heavy white whiskers, sprouting from a weather-furrowed face.
“Seafaring man, aren’t you?” inquired Kent.
“No more. Fifty year of it, man an’ boy, has put me in harbor.”
“That’s Sailor Smith,” explained Jarvis, who had assumed the duties of a self-appointed cicerone. “Not much about the sea and its ways, good or bad, that he don’t know.”