Both men landed and Giuseppe made fast the launch.  Then immediate evidence of tragedy confronted them.  The floor of the cave was of very fine shingle intermixed with sand.  The sides were much broken and the strata of the rock had wrinkled and bent in upon itself.  The lamp stood on a ledge and flung a radius of light over the floor beneath.  Here had been collected the food and drink supplied to Redmayne on the previous day, and it was clear that he had eaten and drunk heartily.  But the arresting fact appeared on the beaten and broken surface of the ground.  Heavy boots had torn this up and plowed furrows in it.  At one spot lay an impression, as though some large object had fallen, and here Brendon saw blood—­a dark patch already drying, for the substance of it was soaked away in the sandy shingle on which it had dropped.

It was a blot rather than a pool and under his electric lamp Mark perceived a trail of other drops extending irregularly toward the back of the cavern.  From the mark of the fallen body a ridge ploughed through the shingle extending rearward, and he judged that one of the two men had certainly felled the other and then drawn him toward the chimney, or tunnel that opened at the back of the cave.  Spots of blood and the dragged impression of some heavy body stretched along the ground to the stone steps and there disappeared.

The detective stopped here and inquired the length of the staircase and whither it led; but for a time his companion appeared too dazed to answer him.  Giuseppe showed a good deal of the white feather, combined with sincere emotion at the implicit tragedy.

“This is death—­death!” he kept repeating, and between his words his mouth hung open and his eyes rolled fearfully over the shadowy places round about him.

“Pull yourself together and help me if you can,” said.  Brendon.  “Every moment may make all the difference.  It looks to me as though somebody had been dragged up here.  Is that possible?”

“To a very powerful man it might be.  But he was weak—­no good.”

“Where does this place lead?”

“There are many shallow steps, then a long slope and, after that, you have to bend your head and scramble out through a hole.  You are then on a plateau halfway up the cliff.  It is a broad ledge and from it one only track, rough and steep, rises up zigzag, like our hairpin roads in Italy, till you reach the summit of the cliff.  But it is rough and broken—­impossible by night.”

“We must go that way all the same and make it possible.  Is the boat fast?”

“If you will help me, we will pull her up into the cave.  Then we can hunt and she will not take harm.”