nst him it would seem the Invisible
Man used an iron rod dragged from a broken piece of fence. He
stopped this quiet man, going quietly home to his midday meal,
attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm, felled
him, and smashed his head to a jelly.

Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing before
he met his victim--he must have been carrying it ready in his hand.
Only two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear
on the matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit was not
in Mr. Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundred
yards out of his way. The other is the assertion of a little girl
to the effect that, going to her afternoon school, she saw the
murdered man "trotting" in a peculiar manner across a field towards
the gravel pit. Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing
something on the ground before him and striking at it ever and
again with his walking-stick. She was the last person to see him
alive. He passed out of her sight to his death, the struggle being
hidden from her only by a clump of beech trees and a slight
depression in the ground.

Now this, to the present writer's mind at least, lifts the murder
out of the realm of the absolutely wanton. We may imagine that
Griffin had taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any
deliberate intention of using it in murder. Wicksteed may then have
come by and noticed this rod inexplicably moving through the air.
Without any thought of the Invisible Man--for Port Burdock is ten
miles away--he may have pursued it. It is quite conceivable that
he may not even have heard of the Invisible Man. One can then
imagine the Invisible Man making off--quietly in order to avoid
discovering his presence in the neighbourhood, and Wicksteed,
excited and curious, pursuing this unaccountably locomotive
object--finally striking at it.

No doubt the Invisible Man could easily have distanced his
middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position
in which Wicksteed's body was found suggests that he had the
ill luck to drive his quarry into a corner between a drift of
stinging nettles and the gravel pit. To those who appreciate the
extraordinary irascibility of the Invisible Man, the rest of the
encounter will be easy to imagine.

But this is pure hypothesis. The only undeniable facts--for stories
of children are often unreliable--are the discovery of Wicksteed's
body, done to death