"Didn't you do the same thing last week? Didn't you forge yourself
and leave yourself dead on the ground? Whether the real Robert
Redmayne is actually a stiff, we can't yet swear, though for my part
I am pretty well prepared to prove it; but this I do know, that the
man who shot at you and missed you and ran away was not Robert
Redmayne."
Brendon demurred. "Remember, I'm not a stranger to him, Ganns. I saw
and spoke with him by the pool in Foggintor Quarry before the
murder."
"What of it? You've never spoken with him since; and, what's more,
you've never seen him since, either. You've seen a forgery. It was a
forgery that looked at you on your way back to Dartmouth in the
moonlight. It was a forgery that robbed the farm for food and lived
in the cave and cut Bendigo Redmayne's throat. It was a forgery that
tried to shoot you and missed."
Mr. Ganns took snuff again and continued.
But as the course of his inquiries belong to the terrible
culmination of the mystery and cannot here be told with their just
significance, it will suffice to record that Brendon presently found
his brain reeling before a theory so extravagant that he would
instantly have discredited it from any lesser lips than those of the
famous man who propounded them.
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