At the sergeant’s cottage they had tied on a bunch of hooks and a weight. French now let these down, having passed the line through one of the holes in the grating to ensure its swinging free from the walls. Gradually he paid out the cord until a faint plop announced that the water had been reached. He continued lowering as long as the cord would run out; then he began jerking it slowly up and down. “Swing it from side to side, Sergeant, while I keep jerking it. If there’s anything there we should get it.” For twenty minutes they worked, and then, just as French was coming to the conclusion that a daylight descent into the well would be necessary, the hooks caught. Something of fair weight was on the line. “Let it stay till it stops swinging, or else we shall lose the hooks in the wall, Mr. French,” the sergeant advised, now as keenly interested as was French himself. “Right, Sergeant. The water will soon steady it.” After a few seconds, French began to pull slowly up, the drops from the attached object echoing loudly up the long funnel. And then came into the circle of the sergeant’s torch a man’s coat. It was black and sodden and shapeless from the water, and slimy to the touch. They lifted it round the well so that the wall should be between them and the house and examined it with their electric torches. In the breast pocket was a letter case containing papers, but it was impossible to read anything they bore. A pipe, a tobacco pouch, a box of matches, and a handkerchief were in the other pockets. Fortunately for French, there was a tailor’s tab sewn into the lining of the breast pocket and he was able to make out part of the legend: “R. Shrubsole & Co., Newton Abbot.” Beneath was a smudge which had evidently been the owner’s name, but this was undecipherable. “We’ll get it from the tailor,” French said. “Let’s try the hooks again.” Once again they lowered their line, but this time without luck. “No good,” French declared at last. “We’ll have to pump it out. You might get the depth, and then close up and leave it as we found it. We’d better bring a portable pump, for I don’t suppose that old thing will work.” They replaced the grating and the billet of wood, and stealing silently out of the yard, rode back to Ashburton. With the coat wrapped in paper and packed in his suitcase, French took an early bus to Newton Abbot. There he soon found Messrs. Shrubsole’s establishment and asked for the proprietor. “It’s not easy to say whose it was,” Mr. Shrubsole declared when he had examined the coat. “You see, these labels of ours are printed—that is, our name and address. But the customer’s name is written and it would not last in the same way. I’m afraid I cannot read it.” “If it had been possible to read it, I should not have come to you, Mr. Shrubsole. I want you to get at it from the cloth and size and probable age and things of that kind. You can surely find out all those things by examination.”