on.
One might dislike his arrogance, or rejoice in his physical beauty,
but to escape his vitality and the electric force of him was
impossible.

Brendon soon reached the police station and hastened to communicate
with Plymouth, Paignton, and Princetown. To the last place he sent a
special direction and told Inspector Halfyard to visit Mrs. Gerry at
Station Cottages and make a careful examination of the room which
Robert Redmayne had there occupied.

CHAPTER V

ROBERT REDMAYNE IS SEEN

A sense of unreality impressed itself upon Mark Brendon after this
stage in his inquiry. A time was coming when the false atmosphere in
which he moved would be blown away by a stronger mind and a greater
genius than his own; but already he found himself dimly conscious
that some fundamental error had launched him along the wrong
road--that he was groping in a blind alley and had missed the only
path leading toward reality.

From Paignton on the following morning he proceeded to Plymouth and
directed a strenuous and close inquiry. But he knew well enough that
he was probably too late and judged with certainty that if Robert
Redmayne still lived, he would no longer be in England. Next he
returned to Princetown, that he might go over the ground again, even
while appreciating the futility of so doing. But the routine had
to be observed. The impressions of naked feet on the sand were
carefully protected. They proved too indefinite to be distinguished,
but he satisfied himself that they represented the footprints of two
men, if not three. He remembered that Robert Redmayne had spoken of
bathing in the pools and he strove to prove three separate pairs of
feet, but could not.

Inspector Halfyard, who had followed the case as closely as it was
possible to do so, cast all blame on Bendigo, the brother of the
vanished assassin.

"He delayed of set purpose," vowed Halfyard, "and them two days may
make just all the difference. Now the murderer's in France, if not
Spain."

"Full particulars have been circulated," explained Brendon, but the
inspector attached no importance to that fact.

"We know how often foreign police catch a runaway," he said.

"This is no ordinary runaway, however. I still prefer to regard him
as insane."

"In that case he'd have been taken before now. And that makes what
was simple before more and more of a puzzle in my opinion. I don't
believe that the man was mad. I believe he was and is all there; and