moors. I've hired a motor-car to
drive you up. Nothing has been disturbed so far. As soon as I learnt you
were coming I telephoned to Pengowan to leave things as they were until
you arrived."

Barrant nodded approval. "Let us go," he said.

The car was waiting outside. The way lay through the town and then across
the moors in undulating ascent until at the highest point a rough track
crossed the road at a spot where four parishes met. On one side of these
cross-roads was a Druidical stone circle, and on the other was a wayside
cross to the memory of an Irish female saint who had crossed to Cornwall
as a missionary in the tenth century, after first recording a holy vow
that she would not change her shift until she had redeemed the whole of
the Cornish natives from idolatry.

From the cross-roads the way again inclined downward to the sea in
increasing savageness of desolation. Stones littered the purple surface of
the moors, or rose in insecure heaps on the steep slopes, as though piled
there by the hands of the giants supposed to have once roved these gloomy
wilds. Solitude held sway, but there was more than solitude in that lonely
aspect: something prehistoric and unknown, unearthly, incomprehensible.
Cairn Brea and the Hill of Fires brooded in the distance; the remains of a
Druid's altar showed darkly on the summit of a nearer hill. No sound broke
the stillness except the faint and distant sobbing of the sea.

St. Fair lay almost hidden in a bend or fold of the moors about a mile
before them, and beyond it Dawfield pointed out to his companion Flint
House, standing in gaunt outline on a tongue of coast thrust defiantly
into the restless waters of the Atlantic.

"A lonely weird place," said Barrant, eyeing his surroundings attentively.
"An ideal setting for a mysterious crime."

They drove on in silence until they reached the churchtown. Inspector
Dawfield steered the car to the modest dwelling of Sergeant Pengowan, whom
they found at his gate awaiting their arrival--a shaggy figure of a rural
policeman of the Cornish Celtic variety, with no trace of Spanish or
Italian ancestry in his florid face, inquisitively Irish blue-grey eyes,
reddish whiskers, and burly frame.

Inspector Dawfield bade him good-day, and added the information that his
companion was Detective Barrant, of Scotland Yard. Pengowan greeted
Barrant with the respect due to the name of Scotland Yard, and took a
humble seat at the back of the car.