Chisholm drew me out of the hotel where we had heard all this and pulled the scrap of bill-head from his pocket-book.

“Now that we’ve got the name to go on,” said he, “we’ll send a wire to this address in Dundee asking if anything’s known there of Mr. John Phillips.  And we’ll have the reply sent to Berwick—­it’ll be waiting us when we get back this morning.”

The name and address in Dundee was of one Gavin Smeaton, Agent, 131A Bank Street.  And the question which Chisholm sent him over the wire was plain and direct enough:  Could he give the Berwick police any information about a man named John Phillips, found dead, on whose body Mr. Smeaton’s name and address had been discovered?

“We may get something out of that,” said Chisholm, as we left the post-office, “and we may get nothing.  And now that we do know that this man left here for Coldstream, let’s get back there, and go on with our tracing of his movements last night.”

But when we had got back to our own district we were quickly at a dead loss.  The folk at Cornhill station remembered the man well enough.  He had arrived there about half-past eight the previous evening.  He had been seen to go down the road to the bridge which leads over the Tweed to Coldstream.  We could not find out that he had asked the way of anybody—­he appeared to have just walked that way as if he were well acquainted with the place.  But we got news of him at an inn just across the bridge.  Such a man—­a gentleman, the inn folk called him—­had walked in there, asked for a glass of whisky, lingered for a few minutes while he drank it, and had gone out again.  And from that point we lost all trace of him.  We were now, of course, within a few miles of the place where the man had been murdered, and the people on both sides of the river were all in a high state of excitement about it; but we could learn nothing more.  From the moment of the man’s leaving the inn on the Coldstream side of the bridge, nobody seemed to have seen him until I myself found his body.

There was another back-set for us when we reached Berwick—­in the reply from Dundee.  It was brief and decisive enough.  “Have no knowledge whatever of any person named John Phillips—­Gavin Smeaton.”  So, for the moment, there was nothing to be gained from that quarter.

Mr. Lindsey and I were at the inn where the body had been taken, and where the inquest was to be held, early next morning, in company with the police, and amidst a crowd that had gathered from all parts of the country.  As we hung about, waiting the coroner’s arrival, a gentleman rode up on a fine bay horse—­a good-looking elderly man, whose coming attracted much attention.  He dismounted and came towards the inn door, and as he drew the glove off his right hand I saw that the first and second fingers of that hand were missing.  Here, without doubt, was the man whom I had seen at the cross-roads just before my discovery of the murder!