“I admire the restraint of your language,” said Wendover with a smile. “But, you know, Clinton, I think you’re a bit hard on the beggar. What could he do but run? I’d have run myself, and I make no bones about it either.” “Oh, so would I,” Sir Clinton conceded carelessly. “It wasn’t the running that put my back up.” “You mean that there’s running _and_ running, so to speak?” “Exactly. Look at the case of that girl who was in the Maze when the murders were done—Miss Forrest, I mean. She had just as much right as Ernest to get hysterical. I won’t say she was as cool as a cucumber when we saw her; one couldn’t expect that. But she kept her nerves in order. She didn’t arrive at the house afterwards in a state of whimpering panic.” “No, that’s true,” Wendover confirmed. “She’s worth a dozen of Ernest Shandon at a pinch, that girl. She kept her head and did exactly what was wanted.” “Quite so. She wasn’t thinking of her own skin all the time like friend Ernest.” “What’s all this about Stenness?” Wendover demanded. “Is it merely some rot that Ernest’s squirted out in the middle of his funk, or is there anything in it?” “Here’s the Maze,” Sir Clinton interrupted, cutting him short. “Suppose we postpone discussion till after dinner to-night, Squire. I don’t want to be distracted for the next few minutes if you don’t mind.” They entered the Maze and made their way towards Helen’s Bower. Near the door into it Wendover stopped suddenly and pointed to the pathway at their feet. “Hullo! Look, Clinton! There’s a bit of black thread lying on the ground.” They stooped over it and examined the fibre. “Ordinary sewing-silk off a reel, obviously,” was all that Sir Clinton vouchsafed. Wendover thought he had seen more in the matter. “Don’t you see what it is, Clinton? Ariadne’s clue! It’s a thread that the murderer must have been using to find his way out of the Maze in a hurry.” “I showed you before that there’s no difficulty in the Maze if you’ve once been taken to the centre.” Wendover had his answer in readiness. “Yes. But suppose you were the murderer, you would have to get out in a hurry, wouldn’t you? And you might lose your head. Anybody might get confused in the flurry. So he took the precaution of laying the thread to the exit; and all he had to do was to follow it and reel it up as he went. And this time a bit of it caught somewhere—see, this end’s tangled in the hedge—and so broke off and he had to leave it behind. When the Shandons were murdered he probably managed to reel up the whole of it and so left no trace behind him.” “Sounds plausible,” Sir Clinton commented curtly. “We may as well collect the specimen, though really there’s nothing distinctive about it. One bit of thread’s very much like another.” “Sherlock Holmes might have made more out of it than that,” said Wendover, rather resentful at the way his discovery had been treated.