"See anything that suggested a struggle?
Or footprints?
Or aught of that sort ?" The superintendent shook his head.
"Naught!" he answered.

"I looked carefully at the ground round those broken railings.

But it's the sort of ground that wouldn't show footprints, you know--covered with that short, wiry mountain grass that shows nothing." "And nothing was found ?" asked Mallalieu.

"No weapons, eh ?" For the life of him he could not resist asking that--his anxiety about the stick was overmastering him.

And when the superintendent and the two policemen who had been with him up to Hobwick Quarry had answered that they had found nothing at all, he had hard work to repress a sigh of relief.