"Under my nose!" I groaned. "A fat lot of good I am!" "My dear chap, you can't possibly watch the whole coast all night and every night. This time the signals were seen from the sea as a matter of fact. But you can note the night, and also the hour, which was 2:45 a.m., G.M.T., as near as I can make out from the report. By the way, you had better set your watch by mine now while we remember. Possibly you may be able to discover who was out at that hour night before last." "I may, but it's a thousand to one against it. Give me a thousand such chances, and I'll get him! That's just about how it seems to work out so far." "Haven't you got any new ideas?" "Without new evidence, what new ideas can one get? And I only got my first piece of evidence this morning. In fact, I haven't had time to think it over yet." "Let's hear it," said my cousin keenly. "I have been on the track of that old boy with spectacles, as being the only definite thing to look for so far. I did what Bolton did--went to see every old man in the place, and this morning I polished off the last of them and came to the same conclusion as he did. There is no such old gentleman on the island. But there _was_ one, for a short time one morning; and he was a fake like Thomas Sylvester Hobhouse; and this morning I've heard of some one else who saw him!" "By Gad!" exclaimed my cousin. "That sounds like the beginning of business." "Only the beginning, I'm afraid. This morning I interview my last old man--to find of course he wasn't the fellow I was after. I interviewed him on the usual subject--ancient traditions of the island, and from that we passed on to the latest tradition, the legend of the mysterious visitor last August. He told me all about it, with many embellishments. However he was shrewd enough not to believe all he heard, and to show me what absurd stories are put about, he informed me that his own small grand-daughter, aged six, had declared that she had seen the mysterious visitor, only she described him as having a white beard and funny spectacles. I asked him exactly where this phenomenon had been observed, and by Jingo, Jack, it was at the very place I met him; only when she saw him he had left the road and was hurrying down to the sea. She described him as running, which finally demolished her reputation for truthfulness, for as her grandfather observed, men of his age don't run. But that was my friend right enough!" "Heading for the sea?" "For the beach, I take it. You see you can pop over the edge almost anywhere along that shore, and get out of sight among the rocks in a moment. I presume he squatted down there, pocketed his spectacles and beard, took off his disreputable overcoat, and either hid it or possibly pinned up the skirts and put it on under his other coat, and walked off looking like--well, that's the rub, what did he look like then? And that's just where I seem no forrader." "Still, this is something."