this extraordinary _demarche_! It is too
absurd!

The story told by Harrison is conspicuously and childishly false. At
every baiting place, at every inn, these weird riders must have been
challenged. If Harrison told truth, he must have named the ship and
skipper that brought him to Dover.

Dismissing Harrison's myth, we ask, what could account for his
disappearance? He certainly walked, on the evening of August 16, to
within about half a mile of his house. He would not have done that had
he been bent on a senile amour involving his absence from home, and
had that scheme of pleasure been in his mind, he would have provided
himself with money. Again, a fit of 'ambulatory somnambulism,' and the
emergence of a split or secondary personality with forgetfulness of
his real name and address, is not likely to have seized on him at that
very moment and place. If it did, as there were no railways, he could
not rush off in a crowd and pass unnoticed through the country.

Once more, the theory of ambulatory somnambulism does not account for
his hacked hat and bloody band found near the whins on the road beyond
Ebrington. Nor does his own story account for them. He was stabbed in
the side and thigh, he says. This would not cut his hat or ensanguine
his band. On the other hand, he would leave pools and tracks of blood
on the road--'the high way.' 'But nothing more could there be found,'
no pools or traces of blood on the road. It follows that the hacked
hat and bloody band were a designed false trail, _not_ left there by
John Perry, as he falsely swore, but by some other persons.

The inference is that for some reason Harrison's presence at Campden
was inconvenient to somebody. He had lived through most troubled
times, and had come into a changed state of affairs with new masters.
He knew some secret of the troubled times: he was a witness better out
of the way. He may conceivably have held a secret that bore on the
case of one of the Regicides; or that affected private interests, for
he was the trusted servant of a great family. He was therefore
spirited away: a trail certainly false--the cut hat and bloody
band--was laid. By an amazing coincidence his servant, John Perry,
went more or less mad--he was not sane on the evening of Thursday,
August 16, and accused himself, his brother, and mother. Harrison was
probably never very far from Campden during the two or three years of
his disappearance. It was obviously made worth his w