He swung slowly round, looking about him. The beach was empty. Farther along it, towards the hotel, a group of bathing-boxes had been erected for the use of hotel visitors. Less than ten yards from the turning-point of the footprints, on the other side of the groyne, Neptune's Seat jutted up from the surrounding sand. It was, as the inspector had said, like a huge stone settee standing with its back to the land; and on the flat part of it lay the body of a man. Sir Clinton bent down and scrutinised the surface of the sand around the turning-point of the track for some minutes, but he made no comment as he completed his survey. When he rose to his full height again, he saw on the road the figure of the fisherman, Wark; and he made a gesture forbidding the man to come down on the sand. “Just go up and see if he's got the candles and the blow-lamp, inspector, please. We may as well finish off here if he has.” Armadale soon returned with the articles. “Good fellow, that,” Sir Clinton commented. “He hasn't wasted time!” He turned and gazed across at the advancing tide. “We'll have to hurry up. Time's getting short. Another half-hour and the water will be up near that rock. We'll need to take the seaward tracks first of all. Hold the blow-lamp, will you, inspector, while I get a candle out.” Wendover's face showed that even yet he had not grasped the chief constable's object. Sir Clinton extracted a candle and lit the blow-lamp. “Plaster of Paris gives a rotten result if you try to take casts of sand-impressions with it,” he explained. “The classics pass rather lightly over the point, but it is so. Therefore we turn to melted wax or tallow, and by dropping it on very carefully in a thin layer at first, we get something that will serve our purpose. Hence the candles and the blow-lamp. See?” He suited the action to the word, making casts of the right and left footprints in the sand from the sharpest impressions he could pick out. “Now we'll take Mr. Billingford's track next,” he said, as he removed the two blocks of wax from their beds. “His footmarks will be the first to be swamped by the tide, so we must get on to them in a hurry.” He led his companions back to the road and turned round the landward end of the groyne. “This is where he landed on the road, evidently. Now step in my tracks and don't wander off the line. We mustn't cut up the ground.” He moved along the trail, and soon reached the tidal mark, after which the footprints grew sharper. A little farther on, he reached a point where Billingford's marks crossed an earlier track—the prints of a woman's nail-studded shoes. “Golfing-shoes, by the look of them,” he pointed out to his companions. “We can leave them alone just now. The tide won't reach here for long enough yet, so we've plenty of time to come back. Billingford's the important thing at present.”