and direct enough: Could he give the Berwick police any information about
a man named John Phillips, found dead, on whose body Mr. Smeaton's name
and address had been discovered?

"We may get something out of that," said Chisholm, as we left the
post-office, "and we may get nothing. And now that we do know that this
man left here for Coldstream, let's get back there, and go on with our
tracing of his movements last night."

But when we had got back to our own district we were quickly at a dead
loss. The folk at Cornhill station remembered the man well enough. He had
arrived there about half-past eight the previous evening. He had been
seen to go down the road to the bridge which leads over the Tweed to
Coldstream. We could not find out that he had asked the way of
anybody--he appeared to have just walked that way as if he were well
acquainted with the place. But we got news of him at an inn just across
the bridge. Such a man--a gentleman, the inn folk called him--had walked
in there, asked for a glass of whisky, lingered for a few minutes while
he drank it, and had gone out again. And from that point we lost all
trace of him. We were now, of course, within a few miles of the place
where the man had been murdered, and the people on both sides of the
river were all in a high state of excitement about it; but we could learn
nothing more. From the moment of the man's leaving the inn on the
Coldstream side of the bridge, nobody seemed to have seen him until I
myself found his body.

There was another back-set for us when we reached Berwick--in the reply
from Dundee. It was brief and decisive enough. "Have no knowledge
whatever of any person named John Phillips--Gavin Smeaton." So, for the
moment, there was nothing to be gained from that quarter.