“I see it!” I cried. “The horse took fright, stopped, and then bolted;
there has been a run-away. That accounts for the turn out. Let's hurry!”
But Marquis detained me with a firm hand on my arm.
“No,” he said, “the horse was not running when it turned out and it did
not stop here in fright. The horse was entirely quiet here. The hoof
marks would show any alarm in the animal, and, moreover, if it had
stopped in fright there would have been an inevitable recoil which would
have thrown the wheels of the vehicle backward out of their track. No
moving animal, man included, stopped by fright fails to register
this recoil. We always look for it in evidences of violent assault.
Footprints invariably show it, and one learns thereby, unerringly, the
direction of the attack.”
He rose, his hand still extended and upon my arm.
“There is only one possible explanation,” he added. “Something happened
in the cut-under to throw it violently about in the road, and it
happened with the horse undisturbed and the vehicle standing still. The
wheel tracks are widened only at one point, showing a transverse but no
lateral movement of the vehicle.”
“A struggle?” I cried. “Major Carrington was right, Madame Barras has
been attacked by the driver!”
Marquis' hand held me firmly in the excitement of that realization.
He was entirely composed. There was even a drawl in his voice as he
answered me.
“Major Carrington, whoever he may be,” he said, “is wrong; if we exclude
a third party, it was Madame Barras who attacked the driver.”
His fingers tightened under my obvious protest.
“It is quite certain,” he continued. “Taking the position of the
standing horse, it will be the front wheels of the cut-under that have
made, this widened track; the wheels under the driver's seat, and not
the wheels under the guest seat, in the rear of the vehicle. There has
been a violent struggle in this cut-under, but it was a struggle that
took place wholly in the front of the vehicle.”
He went on in his maddeningly imperturbable calm.
“No one attacked our guest, but some one, here at this precise point,
did attack the driver of this vehicle.”
“For God's sake,” I cried, “let's hurry!”
He stepped back slowly to the edge of the road and the drawl in his
voice lengthened.
“We do hurry,” he said. “We hurry to the value of knowing that there was
no accident here to the harness, no fright to the horse, no attack on
the lady, and no change in the direction which the vehicle afterwards
took. Suppose we had gone on, in a different form of hurry, ignorant of
these facts?”
At this point I distinctly heard again the sound of a heavy animal in
the wood. Marquis also heard it and he plunged into the thick bushes.
Almost immediately we were at the spot, and before us some heavy object
turned in the leaves.
Marquis whipped an electric-flash out of his pocket. The body of a man,
tied at the hands and heels behind with a hitching-strap, and with a
linen carriage lap-cloth wound around his head and knotted, lay there
endeavoring to ease the rigor of his position by some movement.
We should now know, in a moment, what desperate thing had happened!
I cut the strap, while Marquis got the lap-cloth unwound from about the
man's head. It was the driver of the cut-under. But we got no gain from
his discovery. As soon as his face was clear, he tore out of our grasp
and began to run.
He took the old road to the westward of the island, where perhaps he
lived. We were wholly unable to stop him, and we got no reply to our
shouted queries except his wild cry for help. He considered us his
assailants from whom, by chance, he had escaped. It was folly to think
of coming up with the man. He was set desperately for the westward of
the island, and he would never stop until he reached it.
We turned back into the road:
Marquis' method now changed. He turned swiftly into the road along the
mountain which the cut-under had taken after its capture.