h!" growled one of the diners inside. "What's to do now, then?"

"He's there ... Peter ... under Coupee ... Where Tom Hamon...." panted
the news-bearer as he tore past to his own home. And the rest of
Vauroque emptied itself into the road and stood looking along it, as the
stragglers came up, white-faced and wild-eyed.

"He's there," confirmed one woman, twisting up her loosened hair. "And
just same place where Tom Hamon lay."

"'Tweren't Gard killed _him_, then," said one of the diners, chewing
over that thought with his last mouthful.

"Nor Tom neither, then, maybe," said another.

"We've bin on wrong tack, then;" and they went off round the corner at a
speed their build would hardly have credited them with.

One to the Senechal and one to the Doctor, and then to the Creux, both
telling the news as they went. So that when the officials came hurrying
through the tunnel the greater part of the Island was waiting for them
on the shingle, except those who preferred the wider view from the
cliff above.

Some of the men had been for pulling across at once, but they were
overborne.

"Doctor said he'd like to have seen him afore he was moved last time,"
said old John de Carteret weightily, and would not let a boat go out
till the Doctor and the Senechal came.

It was all waiting for them the moment they arrived, however, and they
stepped in and swung away round Les Laches, and three other boats
followed them so closely that it looked almost like a gruesome race who
should get there first.

There was little talking in any of the boats, but there was some solid
hard thinking, in a mazed kind of way.

Until they knew more of the facts, indeed, they scarce knew what to
think yet. But more than one of them remembered disturbedly how they had
gone in force two days before to fetch Gard off his lonely rock, or to
make an end of him there; and here they were going in force on a very
different errand--an errand which, they could not help seeing, would
bring him off his rock in a very different way, if this present matter
was what it looked as if it might be.

And the Doctor was not long in giving them the facts, when they had run
up on to the shingle, and then crunched through it to the place where
Peter's body lay under the steep black cliff--in the exact spot where
Tom Hamon's had lain just eighteen days before.

But that it was undoubtedly Peter's face and body, those who had come
after Tom the last time might have