to glistening diamonds as I plunged into the thick
of the woods. I had no other thought at that moment but of getting home
and changing my clothes before going to Andrew Dunlop's to tell the
news--when, as I crossed a narrow cut in the undergrowth, I saw, some
distance away, a man's head slowly look out from the trees. I drew back
on the instant, watching. Fortunately--or unfortunately--he was not
looking in my direction, and did not catch even a momentary glance of me,
and when he twisted his neck in my direction I saw that he was the man
we had been talking of, and whom I now knew to be Dr. Meekin. And it
flashed on me at once that he was hanging about for Hollins--all
unconscious that Hollins was lying dead there in the old tower.

So--it was not he who had driven that murderous knife into
Hollins's throat!

I watched him--myself securely hidden. He came out of his shelter,
crossed the cut, went through the belt of wood which I had just passed,
and looked out across the park to the house--all this I saw by cautiously
edging through the trees and bushes behind me. He was a good forty yards
away from me at that time, but I could see the strained, anxious
expression on his face. Things had gone wrong--Hollins and the car had
not met him where he had expected them--and he was trying to find out
what had happened. And once he made a movement as if he would skirt the
coppices and make for the tower, which lay right opposite, but with an
open space between it and us--and then he as suddenly drew back, and
began to go away among the trees.

I followed him, cautiously. I had always been a bit proud of what I
called my woodcraft, having played much at Red Indians as a youngster,
and I took care to walk lightly as I stalked him from one brake to
another. He went on and on--a long way, right away from Hathercleugh, and
in the direction of where Till meets Tweed. And at last he was out of the
Hathercleugh grounds, and close to the Till, and in the end he took to a
thin belt of trees that ran down the side of the Till, close by the place
where Crone's body had been found, and almost opposite the very spot, on
the other bank, where I had come across Phillips lying dead; and suddenly
I saw what he was after. There, right ahead, was an old boat, tied up to
the bank--he was making for it, intending doubtless to put himself across
the two rivers, to get the north bank of the Tweed, and so to make for
safety in other quarters.

It w