ou may make hereafter?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean that if you should happen to find some bone which could be
identified as part of the body of Mr. Bellingham, that fact would be of
more importance to his family than to anyone else. You know that there
is a very valuable estate and a rather difficult will."

"I didn't know it, and I don't see the bearing of it now" (neither did
I, for that matter); "but if you make such a point of being present at
the search, I can't very well refuse. Only you mustn't get in our way,
that's all."

On hearing this conclusion, his assistant, who looked like a
plain-clothes officer, took up his shovel and stepped into the mud that
formed the bottom of the pond, stooping as he went and peering among the
masses of weed that had been left stranded by the withdrawal of the
water. The inspector watched him anxiously, cautioning him from time to
time to "look out where he was treading"; the labourer left the pump and
craned forward from the margin of the mud, and the constable and I
looked on from our respective points of vantage. For some time the
search was fruitless. Once the searcher stooped and picked up what
turned out to be a fragment of decayed wood; then the remains of a
long-deceased jay were discovered, examined, and rejected. Suddenly the
man bent down by the side of a small pool that had been left in one of
the deeper hollows, stared intently into the mud, and stood up.

"There's something here that looks like a bone, sir," he sang out.

"Don't grub about, then," said the inspector. "Drive your shovel right
into the mud where you saw it and bring it to the sieve."

The man followed out these instructions, and as he came shorewards with
a great pile of the slimy mud on his shovel we all converged on the
sieve, which the inspector took up and held over the tub, directing the
constable and labourer to "lend a hand," meaning thereby that they were
to crowd round the tub and exclude me as completely as possible. This,
in fact, they did very effectively with his assistance, for, when the
shovelful of mud had been deposited on the sieve, the four men leaned
over it and so nearly hid it from view that it was only by craning over,
first on one side and then on the other, that I was able to catch an
occasional glimpse of it and to observe it gradually melting away as the
sieve, immersed in the water, was shaken to and fro.

Presently the inspector raised the sieve from th