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"Certainly not!" he cried. "But it has the hotel mark upon it! Ha, it must have been written by that tall Englishman who came in after you had gone. He said-"

But I waited for none of the landlord's explanations.

In a tingle of fear I was already running down the village street, and making for the path which I had so lately descended.

It had taken me an hour to come down.

For all my efforts two more had passed before I found myself at the fall of Reichenbach once more.

There was Holmes's Alpine-stock still leaning against the rock by which I had left him.

But there was no sign of him, and it was in vain that I shouted.

My only answer was my own voice reverberating in a rolling echo from the cliffs around me.

It was the sight of that Alpine-stock which turned me cold and sick.

He had not gone to Rosenlaui, then.

He had remained on that three-foot path, with sheer wall on one side and sheer drop on the other, until his enemy had overtaken him.

The young Swiss had gone too.

He had probably been in the pay of Moriarty, and had left the two men together.

And then what had happened? Who was to tell us what had happened then?

I stood for a minute or two to collect myself, for I was dazed with the horror of the thing.

Then I began to think of Holmes's own methods and to try to practise them in reading this tragedy.

It was, alas, only too easy to do.

During our conversation we had not gone to the end of the path, and the Alpine-stock marked the place where we had stood.

The blackish soil is kept forever soft by the incessant drift of spray, and a bird would leave its tread upon it.

Two lines of footmarks were clearly marked along the farther end of the path, both leading away from me.

There were none returning.

A few yards from the end the soil was all ploughed up into a patch of mud, and the branches and ferns which fringed the chasm were torn and bedraggled.

I lay upon my face and peered over with the spray spouting up all around me.

It had darkened since I left, and now I could only see here and there the glistening of moisture upon the black walls, and far away down at the end of the shaft the gleam of the broken water.

I shouted; but only the same half-human cry of the fall was borne back to my ears.

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