have run a heavy gun over it without leaving any impression. Yet it was clear that two men had come across it to that point, had then descended the cliff to the sand, walked a few yards along the beach, and then—one had murdered the other.
Standing there, staring around me, I was suddenly startled by the explosion of a gun, close at hand. And then, from a coppice, some thirty yards away, a man emerged, whom I took, from his general appearance, to be a gamekeeper. Unconscious of my presence he walked forward in my direction, picked up a bird which his shot had brought down, and was thrusting it into a bag that hung at his hip, when I called to him. He looked round sharply, caught sight of me, and came slowly in my direction, wondering, I could see, who I was. I made towards him. He was a middle-aged, big-framed man, dark of skin and hair, sharp-eyed.
"Are you Mr. Raven's gamekeeper?" I asked, as I got within speaking distance. "Just so—I am staying with Mr. Raven. And I've just made a terrible discovery. There is a man lying behind the cliff there—dead."
"Dead, sir?" he exclaimed. "What—washed up by the tide, likely."
"No," I said. "He's been murdered. Stabbed to death!"
He let out a short, sibilant breath, looking at me with rapidly dilating eyes: they ran me all over, as if he wondered whether I were romancing.
"Come this way," I continued, leading him to the edge of the cliff. "And mind how you walk on the sand—there are footmarks there, and I don't want
