d the energy with which he walked but he passed from
my mind again as I hurried on upon my errand.

It may have been a little over an hour before I reached Meiringen. Old
Steiler was standing at the porch of his hotel.

"Well," said I, as I came hurrying up, "I trust that she is no worse?"

A look of surprise passed over his face, and at the first quiver of his
eyebrows my heart turned to lead in my breast.

"You did not write this?" I said, pulling the letter from my pocket.
"There is no sick Englishwoman in the hotel?"

"Certainly not!" he cried. "But it has the hotel mark upon it! Ha, it
must have been written by that tall Englishman who came in after you had
gone. He said--"

But I waited for none of the landlord's explanations. In a tingle of
fear I was already running down the village street, and making for the
path which I had so lately descended. It had taken me an hour to come
down. For all my efforts two more had passed before I found myself at
the fall of Reichenbach once more. There was Holmes's Alpine-stock still
leaning against the rock by which I had left him. But there was no sign
of him, and it was in vain that I shouted. My only answer was my own
voice reverberating in a rolling echo from the cliffs around me.

It was the sight of that Alpine-stock which turned me cold and sick.
He had not gone to Rosenlaui, then. He had remained on that three-foot
path, with sheer wall on one side and sheer drop on the other, until his
enemy had overtaken him. The young Swiss had gone too. He had probably
been in the pay of Moriarty, and had left the two men together. And then
what had happened? Who was to tell us what had happened then?

I stood for a minute or two to collect myself, for I was dazed with the
horror of the thing. Then I began to think of Holmes's own methods and
to try to practise them in reading this tragedy. It was, alas, only too
easy to do. During our conversation we had not gone to the end of the
path, and the Alpine-stock marked the place where we had stood. The
blackish soil is kept forever soft by the incessant drift of spray,
and a bird would leave its tread upon it. Two lines of footmarks were
clearly marked along the farther end of the path, both leading away from
me. There were none returning. A few yards from the end the soil was
all ploughed up into a patch of mud, and the branches and ferns which
fringed the chasm were torn and bedraggled. I lay upon my face and
peered over with