Long they searched by boat beneath the bluff. The unfortunate man would have fallen into the water that ran deep under the beetling rock. His hat and cane they picked up. Two enormous sharks cruised round the boat as they searched. The doctor would be dead before he touched the water. They shuddered to think that doubtless his body had already been mangled and devoured by cruel fishes of prey. The stains of blood one thought he saw on the water. All the next day sorrowing investigation was made of cliff and shore, but no vestige or memento of the loss was discovered, save that hat and stick.
When the latter was brought to the ship, Elms at the sight of it shuddered, and talked all night in his sleep of a hat and cane, and a face that haunted him. None were surprised at the effect the terrible accident had on the doctor's fast friend and right-hand man.
As the vessel sped uneventfully westward, Elms slowly recovered. One part of him was dead, and the other part felt as though a burden was rolled away.
"I am sorry for the poor old man," he would mutter; "but, as Malduke would say, it had to be. He had done his work, and now vaster prospects open out for Mimosa Vale—and plain John Elms."
For the twentieth, time that day he folded up the precious Will he had recovered from the doctor's papers, and examined, with the interest of a proprietor, all the provisions the good man had made for extension of the new system he had inaugurated.
