Suppose we lift this grating.
Nearer and nearer to high-water mark his pacing took him. Presently, though all the time continuing his whistling, he was scanning the tangled débris that the highest tide of the year had heaped up, almost against the cliff’s foot. His whistling became slow, lugubrious, minor. It sagged. It died away. When it rose again, it was in march time, whereto the virtuoso stepped briskly toward the crowd. By this time the group had received several additions, but had suffered the loss of one of its component parts, the sheriff. Conjecture was buzzing from mouth to mouth as to the official’s sudden defection.
“Whatever it was he got from the pocket,” Kent heard one of the men say, “it started him quick.”
“Looked to me like an envelope,” hazarded some one.
“No,” contradicted Sailor Smith; “paper would have been all pulped up by the water.”
“Marked handkerchief, maybe,” suggested another.
“Like as not,” said Jarvis. “You bet that Len Schlager figured it out there was somethin’ in it for him, anyways. I could see the money-gleam in his eye.”
“That’s right, too,” confirmed the old sailor. “He looked just like that when he brought in that half-wit pedler, thinkin’ he was the thousan’-dollar-reward thief last year.”
“Trust Len Schlager to look out for number one first, an’ be sheriff afterward,” observed some one else.
Amidst this interchange of opinion, none of which was lost upon him, Professor Kent advanced and bent over the manacled corpse.