well. There is widespread conspiracy here, depend upon it,
Mr. Gregg. It will be an interesting case when we get to the bottom of
it all. I only wish this fellow Chater would tell us the reason he
called upon Leithcourt."

"What does he say?"

"Merely that he has no wish to prosecute, and that he has no statement
to make."

"Can't you compel him to say something?" I asked.

"No, I can't. That's the infernal difficulty of it. If he don't choose
to speak, then we must still remain in ignorance, although I feel
confident that he knows something of the strange affair up in the wood."

And although I was silent, I shared the Scotch detective's belief.

The afternoon was chill and wet as I climbed the hill to Greenlaw.

The sudden disappearance of the tenants of Rannoch was, I found, on
everyone's tongue in Dumfries. In the smoke-room of the railway hotel
three men were discussing it with many grimaces and sinister hints, and
the talkative young woman behind the bar asked me my opinion of the
strange goings-on up at the Castle.

As I walked on alone, with the dark line of woods crowning the hill-top
before me, the scene of that double tragedy, I again calmly reviewed the
situation. I longed to go to the hospital and see Hylton Chater, yet
when I recollected the part he had played with Hornby on board the
_Lola_, I naturally hesitated. He was allied with Hornby, apparently
against Leithcourt, although the latter was Hornby's friend.

What, I wondered, had transpired in the library of that gray old castle
which stood out boldly before me, dark and grim, as I plodded on through
the rain? How had Leithcourt succeeded in rendering his enemy insensible
and hiding him in that cupboard? Did he believe that he had killed him?

If I went boldly to Chater, then it would only be the betrayal of
myself. No. I decided that the man who had smoked and chatted with me so
affably on that hot, breathless night in the Mediterranean must remain
in ignorance of my presence, or of my knowledge. Therefore I stayed for
a week at Greenlaw with eyes and ears ever open, yet exercising care
that the patient in the hospital should be unaware of my presence.

Mackenzie saw him on several occasions, but he still persisted in that
tantalizing silence. The inquiry into the death of the unidentified man
in Rannoch Wood had been resumed, and a verdict returned of willful
murder against some person unknown, while of the second crime the public
had n