Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/357

 enough all the way to know that no one else had been at any time in sight. So thick was the mist, that a third person, to have seen him at all, must have passed within arm's length. From all danger of an eye-witness to his being in Shergold's company, or to the supreme moment on the Coupée, Le Mesurier felt secure.

But there was the chance that the body might be recovered. It might be washed up on the Island or elsewhere. The body of young Hamon, who had fallen from the cliffs the previous summer, while searching for gulls' eggs, had been found three weeks later, so far away as the Isle of Wight. It had been unrecognisable, for the face was completely destroyed, but it had been identified by a pocket-knife with the lad's name engraved upon the haft. Le Mesurier wondered whether there was anything on Shergold's person to identify him. Letters? The water would have reduced these to pulp. A ring? The hands and fingers were always the parts first attacked by the fish.

He recalled the gruesome stories told by the boatmen as they row you from point to point, or which the women repeat to each other during the long winter evenings as they sit over the peat fires: stories of the cave-crabs, of the voracious fish which swarm round these coasts; of the mackerel which come in shoals, hundreds of thousands strong, roughening the calm sea like a wind, making a noise like thunder or the engines of some great steamer, as they cut through the surface of the water in pursuit of the little fish that fly before them. One story goes that a man swimming out from Gréve de la Mauve unwittingly struck into such a shoal, and in an instant was pulled down by a million tenacious mouths and never seen again No, there was not much fear that Shergold's body would be found.

But even supposing the body were found and were recognised; even supposing Shergold's movements could be traced to Saint Maclou,