"Well, we can't stand here doing nothing," said Gilling at last. "Look here, we'd better divide forces. This chap'll have to be removed and got to some hospital. Vickers!--I guess you're the quickest-footed of the lot--will you run back to High Nick and tell that chauffeur to bring his car round here? If Sir Cresswell and the police are there, tell them what's happened. Spurge--you go down the glen there, and see if you can see anything of any suspicious-looking craft in that bay you told us of. Copplestone, we can't do any more for this man just now--let's look round. This is a queer business," he went on when they had all departed, and he and Copplestone were walking towards the tower. "The gold's gone, of course?" "No sign of it here, anyway," answered Copplestone, leading him into the ruinous courtyard and pointing to the cavity in the fallen masonry. "That's where it was placed by Chatfield, according to Zachary Spurge." "And of course Chatfield's removed it during the night," remarked Gilling. "That message which Sir Cresswell read us must have been all wrong--the _Pike's_ come south and she's been somewhere about--maybe been in that cove at the end of the glen--though she'll have cleared out of it hours ago!" he concluded disappointedly. "We're too late!" "That theory's not necessarily correct," replied Copplestone. "Sir Cresswell's message may have been quite right. For all we know the folks on the Pike had confederates on shore. Go carefully, Gilling--let's see if we can make out anything in the way of footprints." The ground in the courtyard was grassless, a flooring of grit and loose stone, on which no impression could well be made by human foot. But Copplestone, carefully prospecting around and going a little way up the bank which lay between the tower and the moorland road, suddenly saw something in the black, peat-like earth which attracted his attention and he called to his companion. "I say!" he exclaimed. "Look at this! There!--that's unmistakable enough. And fresh, too!" Gilling bent down, looked, and stared at Copplestone with a question in his eyes. "By Gad!" he said. "A woman!" "And one who wears good and shapely footwear, too," remarked Copplestone. "That's what you'd call a slender and elegant foot. Here it is again--going up the bank. Come on!" There were more traces of this wearer of elegant foot-gear on the soft earth of the bank which ran between the moorland and the stone-strewn courtyard--more again on the edges of the road itself. There, too, were plain signs that a motor-car of some sort had recently been pulled up opposite the tower--Gilling pointed to the indentations made by the studded wheels and to droppings of oil and petrol on the gravelly soil. "That's evident enough," he said. "Those chests have been fetched away during the night, by motor, and a woman's been in at it! Confederates, of course. Now then, the next thing is, which way did that motor go with its contents?"