erywhere for his stick. A little to
the right of his position the side of the quarry shelved less abruptly
than at the place where Stoner had fallen; on the gradual slope there, a
great mass of bramble and gorse, broom and bracken, clustered: he gazed
hard at it, thinking that the stick might have lodged in its meshes. It
would be an easy thing to see that stick in daylight; it was a brightish
yellow colour and would be easily distinguished against the prevalent
greens and browns around there. But he saw nothing of it, and his brain,
working around the event of the night before, began to have confused
notions of the ringing of the stick on the lime-stone slabs at the
bottom of the quarry.

"Aye!" he said musingly, with a final look round. "A nasty place to fall
over, and a bad job--a bad job! Them rails," he continued, pointing to
the broken fencing, "why, they're rotten all through! If a man put his
weight on them, they'd be sure to give way. The poor young fellow must
ha' sat down to rest himself a bit, on the top one, and of course, smash
they went."

"That's what I should ha' said, your Worship," agreed the policeman,
"but some of 'em that were up here seemed to think he'd been forced
through 'em, or thrown against 'em, violent, as it might be. They think
he was struck down--from the marks of a blow that they found."

"Aye, just so," said Mallalieu, "but he could get many blows on him as
he fell down them rocks. Look for yourself!--there's not only rough
edges of stone down there, but snags and roots of old trees that he'd
strike against in falling. Accident, my lad!--that's what it's
been--sheer and pure accident."

The policeman neither agreed with nor contradicted the Mayor, and
presently they went down to the bottom of the quarry again, where
Mallalieu, under pretence of thoroughly seeing into everything, walked
about all over the place. He did not find the stick, and he was quite
sure that nobody else had found it. Finally he went away, convinced that
it lay in some nook or cranny of the shelving slope on to which he had
kicked it in his sudden passion of rage. There, in all probability, it
would remain for ever, for it would never occur to the police that
whoever wielded whatever weapon it was that struck the blow would not
carry the weapon away with him. No--on the point of the stick Mallalieu
began to feel easy and confident.

He grew still easier and more confident about the whole thing during the
cou