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.