own!" he cried. "Why, what are you doing up here?"

"I have been talking to poor Martin," answered the doctor, and made
a rather awkward movement with his hand toward the road down to the
village. Following the gesture, Paynter dimly saw another dark figure
walking down in the blood-red distance. He also saw that the hand
motioning was really black, and not merely in shadow; and, coming
nearer, found the doctor's dress was really funereal, down to the detail
of the dark gloves. It gave the American a small but queer shock, as if
this were actually an undertaker come up to bury the corpse that could
not be found.

"Poor Martin's been looking for his chopper," observed Doctor Brown,
"but I told him I'd picked it up and kept it for him. Between ourselves,
I hardly think he's fit to be trusted with it." Then, seeing the glance
at his black garb, he added: "I've just been to a funeral. Did you know
there's been another loss? Poor Jake the fisherman's wife, down in the
cottage on the shore, you know. This infernal fever, of course."

As they both turned, facing the red evening light, Paynter instinctively
made a closer study, not merely of the doctor's clothes, but of the
doctor. Dr. Burton Brown was a tall, alert man, neatly dressed, who
would otherwise have had an almost military air but for his spectacles
and an almost painful intellectualism in his lean brown face and bald
brow. The contrast was clinched by the fact that, while his face was of
the ascetic type generally conceived as clean-shaven, he had a strip of
dark mustache cut too short for him to bite, and yet a mouth that often
moved as if trying to bite it. He might have been a very intelligent
army surgeon, but he had more the look of an engineer or one of those
services that combine a military silence with a more than military
science. Paynter had always respected something ruggedly reliable about
the man, and after a little hesitation he told him all the discoveries.

The doctor took the hat of the dead Squire in his hand, and examined it
with frowning care. He put one finger through the hole in the crown and
moved it meditatively. And Paynter realized how fanciful his own fatigue
must have made him; for so silly a thing as the black finger waggling
through the rent in that frayed white relic unreasonably displeased him.
The doctor soon made the same discovery with professional acuteness,
and applied it much further. For when Paynter began to tell him of
the