Page:The Moonstone.djvu/174

174 the Sergeant had gone to the sands when Duffy came running back with a message for me. Sergeant Cuff had given the boy a leaf torn out of his pocket-book, on which was written in pencil, "Send me one of Rosanna Spearman's boots, and be quick about it."

I despatched the first woman-servant I could find to Rosanna's room; and I sent the boy back to say that I myself would follow him with the boot.

This, I am well aware, was not the quickest way to take of obeying the directions which I had received. But I was resolved to see for myself what new mystification was going on, before I trusted Rosanna's boot in the Sergeant's hands. My old notion of screening the girl if I could seemed to have come back on me again at the eleventh hour. This state of feeling (to say nothing of the detective-fever) hurried me off, as soon as the boot was put in my hands, at the nearest approach to a run which a man turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.

As I got near the shore the clouds gathered black and the rain came down, drifting in great white sheets of water before the wind. I heard the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank, at the mouth of the bay. A little farther on I passed the boy crouching for shelter under the lee of the sand-hills. Then I saw the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like a flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach with one solitary black figure standing on it—the figure of Sergeant Cuff.

He waved his hand toward the north when he first saw me. "Keep on that side!" he shouted. "And come on down here to me!"

I went down to him, choking for breath, with my heart leaping as if it was like to leap out of me. I was past speaking. I had a hundred questions to put to him; and not one of them would pass my lips. His face frightened me. I saw a look in his eyes which was a look of horror. He snatched the boot out of my hand, and set it in a foot-mark on the sand, bearing south from us as we stood, and pointing straight toward the rocky ledge called the South Spit. The mark was not yet blurred out by the rain—and the girl's boot fitted it to a hair.

The Sergeant pointed to the boot in the foot-mark, without saying a word.

I caught at his arm and tried to speak to him, and failed as I had failed when I tried before. He went on, following the footsteps down and down to where the rocks and the