Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 10
But in the darkness he now found it impossible to retrace his course among the tall flowers. He vainly struck match after match in a search for the alley he had made on his previous journey. The wind had risen higher, and his lights were extinguished before they could serve his purpose. He called at intervals, but elicited no reply. The man had ceased to moan; for Colin, when he stood still to listen, could hear nothing except the rustling of the lupins in the gentle breeze.
Abandoning his attempt to retrace his steps, Colin began to seek at random around the spot where he supposed the man must be lying. He tramped hither and thither among the swishing stems in the gloom, stooping, peering in the shadows, and occasionally feeling hopefully with his hands when he thought he had struck the right place. For many minutes, this hit-or-miss method yielded no results; but at last, by sheer chance, he managed to blunder upon the very spot he had last seen his quarry. By the flash of a match he recognised the place beyond doubt, with the stems crushed and broken where the man had fallen.
But the short-lived gleam of the match showed something else. No human figure lay among the lupins. The stranger had vanished.
This was the last thing Colin had anticipated. The man had all the look of being badly hurt and unable to move. How had he got away? With his superfluous tumbler in his hand, Colin stood for a while, striving to find some explanation of this disappearance. He could only suppose that the fellow had regained consciousness, and that, in a bemused attempt to seek assistance, he had crawled farther into the lupin field, and then fainted once more. Putting his unneeded tumbler on the ground, Colin set himself to search the immediate neighbourhood; but he expended the remainder of his matches without result. There was no trace of the missing man, nor was there the slightest response to Colin’s encouraging calls.
He rose to his feet after some fruitless groping and considered the situation. In the dark it was hopeless to persevere. The man might have crawled for a considerable distance; and the searching of that great belt of high stems would have been a task for a large party armed with storm-lanterns. Even if he roused Dinnet now, the pair of them could be successful only by a stroke of sheer luck. He glanced at his wrist-watch and the illuminated dial gave him a suggestion. In an hour or two the dawn would break; and then it would be a simple matter to run the man down. He must have left a plain trail through the lupins as he crawled away. That trail could be followed up in daylight without the slightest trouble, though in the dark the task was beset with difficulties owing to Colin’s own manoeuvres having left track after track around the starting-point. And, after all, what was a couple of hours? The first flush of Colin’s humanitarian feelings was passing off, and he felt his aversion to the unknown man increasing. That slab of brutish face appeared in his mind’s eye and dispelled a good deal of his sympathy. A wrong ’un, that chap, if Colin was any judge. Anyhow, he would come to no harm in a matter of a couple of hours. He wasn’t much of a tender plant, by the look of him. Colin, though not quite comfortable in his conscience, decided to abandon his search for the present and await the dawn.
He remembered the tumbler which he had set down, and he began to grope round in the hope of coming upon it. Instead of the glass, his hand encountered a smooth, weighty, metallic object about the size of a small cake of soap. He fingered it in the dark, but could make nothing of it. From its massiveness, he took it be a lump of lead cast in a mould; no other common metal would have weighed as much for its size. On the face of things it must have some connection with the stranger. When they got hold of the fellow they could return it to him in case it was of importance. Colin slipped it carelessly into his pocket and resumed his gropings after the missing tumbler.
He came upon it at last, knocking it over and spilling its contents on the ground. Picking it up, he began to move towards the house. Then, to quieten his conscience, which still pricked him, he made several casts at random on the offchance of coming upon the stranger. Failing in his rather perfunctory attempt, he called once or twice and halted to listen for a reply. Then, still rather uncomfortable, but plying himself with counter-arguments, he walked back to Wester Voe to await the coming of the dawn.
Dew had been falling heavily that night, and among the lupins he had got himself rather wet. The tumbler in his hand suggested the advisability of a drink, if he was going to sit about for an hour or two. He went into the dining-room, mixed himself a stiff glass of whiskey and soda, and then betook himself to the lounge, where he dropped thankfully into one of the big saddle-bag chairs.
The whiskey had aroused him mentally; and, having nothing to occupy him until the imminent dawn made renewed searchings feasible, he began to turn over the whole incident in his mind.
Who was this mysterious wanderer in the night? Whoever he might be, Colin decided, he didn’t correspond to Mrs. Dinnet’s account of the man Northfleet. She had described Northfleet as “very nice.” Colin still had a vivid recollection of that blackguardly