"After my examination of the body I went to the bush, and there, in the thick of it, were, for me, sufficiently distinct knee-marks, in one of which the knee had crushed a spray of the bush against the ground, and from that spray a leaf was missing. Behind the knee-marks were the indentations of boot-toes in the soft, bare earth under the bush, and thus the thing was plain. The poor lunatic had come in sight of the dangling rope, and the temptation to suicide was irresistible. To people in a deranged state of mind the mere sight of the means of self-destruction is often a temptation impossible to withstand. But at that moment he must have heard the steps--probably the voices--of the brothers behind him on the winding path. He immediately hid in the bush till they had passed. It is probable that seeing who the men were, and conjecturing that they were following him--thinking also, perhaps, of things that had occurred between them and himself--his inclination to self-destruction became completely ungovernable, with the result that you saw. "But before I inspected the bush I noticed one or two more things about the body. You remember I inquired if either of the brothers Foster was left-handed, and was assured that neither was. But clearly the hand had been cut off by a left-handed man, with a large, sharply pointed knife. For well away to the _right_ of where the wrist had hung the knife-point had made a tiny triangular rent in the coat, so that the hand must have been held in the mutilator's right hand, while he used the knife with his left--clearly a left-handed man. "But most important of all about the body was the jagged hair over the right ear. Everywhere else the hair was well cut and orderly--here it seemed as though a good piece had been, so to speak, _sawn_ off. What could anybody want with a dead man's right hand and certain locks of his hair? Then it struck me suddenly--the man was hanged; it was the Hand of Glory! "Then you will remember I went, at your request, to see the footprints of the Fosters on the part of the path _past_ the watercourse. Here again it was muddy in the middle, and the two brothers had walked as far apart as before, although nobody had walked between them. A final proof, if one were needed, of my theory as to the three lines of footprints.