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once more. Look here, I'll lean over the edge and watch it fall. Only we shall want a bigger stone, if you can find one."

"All right. Only they're all little ones between the sleepers. I'll look along the bank a bit. I say, what the devil's this?"

It was a sight that on most days would have given little surprise to the pair; a common enough sight, indeed, down in the valley, but up here a portent. Caught in a clump of grass, some twenty yards down the line in the Paston Oatvile direction, was a golf-ball.

"That beats everything," declared Gordon. "I don't believe Carmichael on his worst day could slice a ball a hundred feet up in the air and lodge it in that clump."

Reeves was examining the trove intently. "I don't like this a bit," he said. "This is practically a new ball, not the sort of ball a man would throw away casually as he walked down the line. A Buffalo, I see⁠—dash it all, there are at least a dozen of us use those. Who'll tell us whether Brotherhood used them?"

"I say, steady on! You've got this murder business on the brain. How can you tell the ball hasn't been there weeks and weeks?"

"Very simply, because it happens to have snapped the stalk of this flower⁠—scabious, don't they call 'em⁠—which isn't dead yet. The ball was right on top when I found it. I'm hanged if that ball fell there more than twenty-four hours ago."