e taking ourselves. And I explained to him that it was just the
ordinary high-road that ran between Berwick and Kelso that Maisie would
follow, until she came to Cornhill, where she would turn south by way of
Mindrum Mill, where--if that fact had anything to do with her
disappearance--she would come into a wildish stretch of country at the
northern edge of the Cheviots.

"There'll be places--villages and the like--all along, I expect?" he
asked.

"It's a lonely road, Mr. Smeaton," I answered. "I know it well--what
places there are, are more off than on it, but there's no stretch of it
that's out of what you might term human reach. And how anybody could
happen aught along it of a summer's evening is beyond me!--unless indeed
we're going back to the old kidnapping times. And if you knew Maisie
Dunlop, you'd know that she's the sort that would put up a fight if she
was interfered with! I'm wondering if this has aught to do with all yon
Carstairs affair? There's been such blackness about that, and such
villainy, that I wish I'd never heard the name!"

"Aye!" he answered. "I understand you. But--it's coming to an end. And in
queer ways--queer ways, indeed!"

I made no reply to him--and I was sick of the Carstairs matters; it
seemed to me I had been eating and drinking and living and sleeping with
murder and fraud till I was choked with the thought of them. Let me only
find Maisie, said I to myself, and I would wash my hands of any further
to-do with the whole vile business.

But we were not to find Maisie during the long hours of that weary
afternoon and the evening that followed it. Mr. Lindsey had bade me keep
the car and spare no expense, and we journeyed hither and thither all
round the district, seeking news and getting none. She had been seen just
once, at East Ord, just outside Berwick, by a man that was working in his
cottage garden by the roadside--no other tidings could we get. We
searched all along the road that runs by the side of Bowmont Water,
between Mindrum and the Yetholms, devoting ourselves particularly to that
stretch as being the loneliest, and without result. And as the twilight
came on, and both of us were dead weary, we turned homeward, myself
feeling much more desperate than even I did when I was swimming for my
very life in the North Sea.

"And I'm pretty well sure of what it is, now, Mr. Smeaton!" I exclaimed
as we gave up the search for that time. "There's been foul play! And I'll
have all