“’Tweren’t Gard killed him, then,” said one of the diners, chewing over that thought with his last mouthful.

“Nor Tom neither, then, maybe,” said another.

“We’ve bin on wrong tack, then;” and they went off round the corner at a speed their build would hardly have credited them with.

One to the Senechal and one to the Doctor, and then to the Creux, both telling the news as they went.  So that when the officials came hurrying through the tunnel the greater part of the Island was waiting for them on the shingle, except those who preferred the wider view from the cliff above.

Some of the men had been for pulling across at once, but they were overborne.

“Doctor said he’d like to have seen him afore he was moved last time,” said old John de Carteret weightily, and would not let a boat go out till the Doctor and the Senechal came.

It was all waiting for them the moment they arrived, however, and they stepped in and swung away round Les Laches, and three other boats followed them so closely that it looked almost like a gruesome race who should get there first.

There was little talking in any of the boats, but there was some solid hard thinking, in a mazed kind of way.

Until they knew more of the facts, indeed, they scarce knew what to think yet.  But more than one of them remembered disturbedly how they had gone in force two days before to fetch Gard off his lonely rock, or to make an end of him there; and here they were going in force on a very different errand—­an errand which, they could not help seeing, would bring him off his rock in a very different way, if this present matter was what it looked as if it might be.

And the Doctor was not long in giving them the facts, when they had run up on to the shingle, and then crunched through it to the place where Peter’s body lay under the steep black cliff—­in the exact spot where Tom Hamon’s had lain just eighteen days before.

But that it was undoubtedly Peter’s face and body, those who had come after Tom the last time might have thought they were going through their previous experience over again.  It was all so like.

They all stood round in a dark, silent group while the Doctor carefully examined the body, and the Senechal looked on with stern and troubled face.

“It is most extraordinary,” said the Doctor, straightening up from his task at last, and his face, too, was knitted with perplexity, but had something else in it besides.  “This man has been done to death in exactly the same way as Hamon”—­a rustle of surprise shook the group of silent onlookers.  “The head has been beaten in just as Hamon’s was—­with some blunt rounded tool, I should say.  These other wounds and contusions are the results of his fall down the cliff.  He has been dead at least eight hours.  Lift him carefully, men.  We can do nothing more here—­unless by chance the one who did it flung his weapon after him, and we could find it.”