“You never told any one what you were going to do, Brand?  Nobody helped you?”

“Not a soul!  I’m not yo’r blabbin’ sort!  But now I’m done—­I’m clemmed!”

And he tottered against the bridge as he spoke.  Baden caught him.

“Can you walk with my help?  I have some brandy.”

And taking from his pocket the tiny flask that a man with a weak heart is apt to carry, he put it into a shaking hand.  Brand drank it greedily.

They stumbled on together, down the narrow road, through the streaming rain.  It was a mile to the Whitebeck police station.  Brand gave a gasping, incoherent account of his doings during his ten days of hiding—­the various barns and outhouses he had sheltered in—­the food he had been able to steal—­the narrow escapes he had run.  And every now and then, the frenzy of his hatred for the murdered man would break in, and he would throw out hints of the various mad schemes he had entertained at different times for the destruction of his enemy.

But presently he ceased to talk.  It was evident that his weakness was great; he clung heavily to Boden’s arm.

They reached a point where a road branched to the left.  A roar of furious water greeted their ears.

“That’s t’ beck unner Wanthwaite Bridge,” said Brand feebly.  “Wait a bit, sir.”

He sank down on a stone by the roadside.  Through the trees on the left the foaming river glimmered in the departing light.  Boden bent over him, encouraging him with the promise of shelter and food, murmuring also of God, the help of the sinner.  Suddenly the lad leapt up.

“Aye! that’ll end it!—­an’ a good job!”

He began to run up the left-hand road.  Boden pursued him, struggled with him, but in vain.  Brand threw him off, reached the bridge, mounted the parapet, and from there flung himself headlong into the spate rushing furiously below.

At the same moment a dog-cart driven by two young farmers appeared on the main road of the valley.  Boden’s shouts reached them, and they came to his aid.  But Brand had disappeared.  The river swept him down like a withered branch; and it was many hours before the body was recovered, half a mile from the spot where he sank.

XXII

Boden was just coming to the end of his evidence.  The adjourned inquest on Melrose, held in the large parlour of the old Whitebeck inn, was densely crowded, and the tension of a charged moment might be felt.  Men sat gaping, their eyes wandering from the jury to the witness or the gray-haired coroner; to young Lord Tatham sitting beside the tall dark man who had been Mr. Melrose’s agent, and was now the inheritor of his goods; to the alert and clean-shaven face of Undershaw, listening with the concentration of the scientific habit to the voice from the witness-box.  And through the strained attention of the room there ran the stimulus of that gruesome new fact—­the presence overhead of yet another dead man, dragged only some twenty-four hours earlier from the swollen waters of the river.