"Then the police can ask that person if Hollis did meet him!" exclaimed Neale. "And they can ask, too, what that person did with Hollis. Solve that, and we'll see daylight!" But Betty shook her head with clear indications of doubt as to the validity of this theory. "No!" she said. "It won't come off, Wallie. If there's been foul play, the guilty people will have had too much cleverness to leave any evidences on their victim. I don't believe they'll find anything on Hollis that'll clear things up. Daylight isn't coming from that quarter!" "Where are we to look for it, then?" asked Neale dismally. "It's somewhere far back," declared Betty. "I've felt that all along. The secret of all this affair isn't in anything that's been done here and lately--it's in something deep down. And how to get at it, and to find out about my uncle, I don't know." Neale felt it worse than idle to offer more theories--speculation was becoming useless. He left Betty at the Scarnham Arms, and went round to the police-station to meet Starmidge: together they went over to the mortuary. And before noon they knew all that medical examination and careful searching could tell them about the dead man. Hollis, said the police-surgeon and another medical man who had been called in to assist him, bore no marks of violence other than those which were inevitable in the case of a man who had fallen seventy feet. His neck was broken; he must have died instantaneously. There was nothing to show that there had been any struggle previous to his fall. Had such a struggle taken place, the doctors would have expected to find certain signs and traces of it on the body: there were none. Everything seemed to point to the theory that he had leaned over the insecure fencing of the old shaft to look into its depths; probably to drop stones into them; that the loose, unmortared parapet had given way with his weight, and that he had plunged headlong to the bottom. He might have been pushed in--from behind--of course, but that was conjecture. Under ordinary circumstances, agreed both doctors, everything would have seemed to point to accident. And one of them suggested that it was very probable that what really had happened was this--Hollis, on his way to call on some person in the neighbourhood, or on his return from such a call, had crossed the moor, been attracted by inquisitiveness to the old mine, had leaned over its parapet, and fallen in. Accident!--it all looked like sheer accident.