“The patriarch in the circus wagon.”
“Oh! I’d forgotten. Why, when I was trying to trail the woman, I chanced upon him and asked if he had seen her. He hadn’t.”
“He had. Also he heard a terrified cry shortly after. The cry, he thought, was in a man’s voice. Simon P. Groot isn’t wholly lacking in sense of observation.”
“A man’s voice in a cry? What could that mean?”
“Oh, any one of several hundred unthinkable things,” said Kent patiently.
“Wait! She must have attacked some other man, as she did me. She was going to a rendezvous, wasn’t she? Then she and the man she went to meet quarreled, and he killed her by throwing her over the cliff.”
“And the handcuffs?”
Sedgwick’s hands went to his head. “That, of course, is the inexplicable thing. But don’t you think that was the way she met her death?”
“No.”
“Then what do you think?”