“Dear sir:  The police have told me that you are in Princetown, and it seems as though Providence had sent you.  I fear that I have no right to seek your services directly, but if you can answer the prayer of a heartbroken woman and give her the benefit of your genius in this dark moment, she would be unspeakably thankful.

“Faithfully yours,
Jenny Pendean.”

Mark Brendon murmured “damn” gently under his breath.  Then he turned to Will.

“Where is Mrs. Pendean’s house?” he asked.

“In Station Cottages, just before you come to the prison woods, sir.”

“Run over, then, and say I’ll call in half an hour.”

“There!” Will grinned.  “I told ’em you’d never keep out of it!”

He was gone and Brendon read the letter again, studied its neat caligraphy, and observed that a tear had blotted the middle of the sheet.  Once more he said “damn” to himself, dropped his fishing basket and rod, turned up the collar of his mackintosh, and walked to the police station, where he heard a little of the matter in hand from a constable and then asked for permission to use the telephone.  In five minutes he was speaking to his own chief at Scotland Yard, and the familiar cockney voice of Inspector Harrison came over the two hundred odd miles that separated the metropolis of convicts from the metropolis of the world.

“Man apparently murdered here, inspector.  Chap who is thought to have done it disappeared.  Widow wants me to take up case.  I’m unwilling to do so; but it looks like duty.”  So spoke Brendon.

“Right.  If it looks like duty, do it.  Let me hear again to-night.  Halfyard, chief at Princetown, is an old friend of mine.  Very good man.  Good-bye.”

Mark then learned that Inspector Halfyard was already at Foggintor.

“I’m on this,” said Mark to the constable.  “I’ll come in again.  Tell the inspector to expect me at noon for all details.  I’m going to see Mrs. Pendean now.”

The policeman saluted.  He knew Brendon very well by sight.

“I hope it won’t knock a hole in your holiday, sir.  But I reckon it won’t.  It’s all pretty plain sailing by the look of it.”

“Where’s the body?”

“That’s what we don’t know yet, Mr. Brendon; and that’s what only Robert Redmayne can tell us by the look of it.”

The detective nodded.  Then he sought No. 3, Station Cottages.

The little row of attached houses ran off at right angles to the high street of Princetown.  They faced northwest, and immediately in front of them rose the great, tree-clad shoulder of North Hessory Tor.  The woods ascended steeply and a stone wall ran between them and the dwellings beneath.

Brendon knocked at No. 3 and was admitted by a thin, grey-haired woman who had evidently been shedding tears.  He found himself in a little hall decorated with many trophies of fox hunting.  There were masks and brushes and several specimens of large Dartmoor foxes, who had run their last and now stood stuffed in cases hung upon the walls.