Impelled, half by curiosity, and half by the restlessness which possessed him, he turned and walked some little distance, over a kind of dilapidated wharf, in the direction from which the man had come. The place was quite lonely and deserted, and only the skeleton-like frames of some old barges and other vessels, which some one, at some remote period, had been breaking up, stood up gaunt against the sky. Some darker object, among some broken timbers at the very edge of the water, attracted his attention; he went forward quickly, and then, with a half-suppressed cry, threw himself on his knees beside it. It was the body of a man, who had apparently fallen just where he had been struck down; the hand which Philip Crowdy touched was quite warm, although the man was stone dead. But that was not the strange part—that was not the reason why the living man, bending close above the dead, stared at the face as though he could never gaze enough. The faces that stared so grimly, in that desolate spot, into each other—the dead and the living—were alike in every particular, down to the smallest detail; it was as though the living man gazed into a mirror, which threw back every line, even every faint touch of colouring, in his own face. “Dandy Chater!” whispered Crowdy to himself in an awed voice. “So, I’ve found you at last!” CHAPTER II ON THE TRACK OF A SHADOW The man’s first impulse was to shout for assistance; his second, to dash hot foot after the murderer; his last, to keep perfectly still, while he thought hard, with all his wits sharpened by the crisis of the moment. For hours, he had been racing across country, and hiding and dodging, in pursuit of this man; and he came upon him lying dead, the victim of he knew not what conspiracy. Instinctively he glanced about him, with the dread of seeing other murderous eyes watching; instinctively sprang to his feet, the better to face whatever danger might threaten. The thing was so awful, and so unexpected, that the man, for a moment, had no power to face it; indeed, he had started to run from the place, in an agony of fear, when a sudden thought swept over him—arresting his flight, and holding him as motionless as though some mortal hand had gripped him, and brought him to bay. “Dandy Chater dead!” he gasped. “This puts a new light on things indeed! Dandy Chater dead—and out of the way! Let me think; let me hammer something out of this new horror—let me find the best road to travel!” He sat down among the rotting timbers, and propped his chin in his palms, and stared at the dead man. “Who am I? Who—in all this amazing world, will believe my story, if I tell it? Dandy Chater out of the way!——My God!—that serves my purpose; that was what I wanted. The game’s in my hands; the likeness——”