is story begins.

Night was far advanced and the lights shone in the cottage that
served for a temporary police station near the coast. On one side of
it were the last houses of the straggling village, and on the other
nothing but a waste moorland stretching away toward the sea, the
line of which was broken by no landmark except a solitary tower of
the prehistoric pattern still found in Ireland, standing up as
slender as a column, but pointed like a pyramid. At a wooden table
in front of the window, which normally looked out on this landscape,
sat two men in plain clothes, but with something of a military
bearing, for indeed they were the two chiefs of the detective
service of that district. The senior of the two, both in age and
rank, was a sturdy man with a short white beard, and frosty eyebrows
fixed in a frown which suggested rather worry than severity.

His name was Morton, and he was a Liverpool man long pickled in the
Irish quarrels, and doing his duty among them in a sour fashion not
altogether unsympathetic. He had spoken a few sentences to his
companion, Nolan, a tall, dark man with a cadaverous equine Irish
face, when he seemed to remember something and touched a bell which
rang in another room. The subordinate he had summoned immediately
appeared with a sheaf of papers in his hand.

"Sit down, Wilson," he said. "Those are the depositions, I
suppose."

"Yes," replied the third officer. "I think I've got all there is to
be got out of them, so I sent the people away."

"Did Mary Cregan give evidence?" asked Morton, with a frown that
looked a little heavier than usual.

"No, but her master did," answered the man called Wilson, who had
flat, red hair and a plain, pale face, not without sharpness. "I
think he's hanging round the girl himself and is out against a
rival. There's always some reason of that sort when we are told the
truth about anything. And you bet the other girl told right enough."

"Well, let's hope they'll be some sort of use," remarked Nolan, in a
somewhat hopeless manner, gazing out into the darkness.

"Anything is to the good," said Morton, "that lets us know anything
about him."

"Do we know anything about him?" asked the melancholy Irishman.

"We know one thing about him," said Wilson, "and it's the one thing
that nobody ever knew before. We know where he is."

"Are you sure?" inquired Morton, looking at him sharply.

"Quite sure," replied his assistant. "At this very minute