“I know too much,” said Horne Fisher, “and all the wrong things.”

The other three men were drawing nearer to them, but before they came too near, Harker said, in a voice that had recovered all its firmness: 

“Yes, I did destroy a paper, but I really did find a paper, too; and I believe that it clears us all.”

“Very well,” said Fisher, in a louder and more cheerful tone; “let us all have the benefit of it.”

“On the very top of Sir Isaac’s papers,” explained Harker, “there was a threatening letter from a man named Hugo.  It threatens to kill our unfortunate friend very much in the way that he was actually killed.  It is a wild letter, full of taunts; you can see it for yourselves; but it makes a particular point of poor Hook’s habit of fishing from the island.  Above all, the man professes to be writing from a boat.  And, since we alone went across to him,” and he smiled in a rather ugly fashion, “the crime must have been committed by a man passing in a boat.”

“Why, dear me!” cried the duke, with something almost amounting to animation.  “Why, I remember the man called Hugo quite well!  He was a sort of body servant and bodyguard of Sir Isaac.  You see, Sir Isaac was in some fear of assault.  He was—­he was not very popular with several people.  Hugo was discharged after some row or other; but I remember him well.  He was a great big Hungarian fellow with great mustaches that stood out on each side of his face.”

A door opened in the darkness of Harold March’s memory, or, rather, oblivion, and showed a shining landscape, like that of a lost dream.  It was rather a waterscape than a landscape, a thing of flooded meadows and low trees and the dark archway of a bridge.  And for one instant he saw again the man with mustaches like dark horns leap up on to the bridge and disappear.

“Good heavens!” he cried.  “Why, I met the murderer this morning!”

* * *

Horne Fisher and Harold March had their day on the river, after all, for the little group broke up when the police arrived.  They declared that the coincidence of March’s evidence had cleared the whole company, and clinched the case against the flying Hugo.  Whether that Hungarian fugitive would ever be caught appeared to Horne Fisher to be highly doubtful; nor can it be pretended that he displayed any very demoniac detective energy in the matter as he leaned back in the boat cushions, smoking, and watching the swaying reeds slide past.

“It was a very good notion to hop up on to the bridge,” he said.  “An empty boat means very little; he hasn’t been seen to land on either bank, and he’s walked off the bridge without walking on to it, so to speak.  He’s got twenty-four hours’ start; his mustaches will disappear, and then he will disappear.  I think there is every hope of his escape.”

“Hope?” repeated March, and stopped sculling for an instant.