save in a murderous frenzy, it is impossible to imagine. Indeed the

theory of madness is almost unavoidable. Mr. Wicksteed was a man of

forty-five or forty-six, steward to Lord Burdock, of inoffensive

habits and appearance, the very last person in the world to provoke

such a terrible antagonist. Against him it would seem the Invisible

Man used an iron rod dragged from a broken piece of fence. He

stopped this quiet man, going quietly home to his midday meal,

attacked him, beat down his feeble defences, broke his arm, felled

him, and smashed his head to a jelly.

Of course, he must have dragged this rod out of the fencing before

he met his victim--he must have been carrying it ready in his hand.

Only two details beyond what has already been stated seem to bear

on the matter. One is the circumstance that the gravel pit was not

in Mr. Wicksteed's direct path home, but nearly a couple of hundred

yards out of his way. The other is the assertion of a little girl

to the effect that, going to her afternoon school, she saw the

murdered man "trotting" in a peculiar manner across a field towards

the gravel pit. Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing

something on the ground before him and striking at it ever and

again with his walking-stick. She was the last person to see him

alive. He passed out of her sight to his death, the struggle being

hidden from her only by a clump of beech trees and a slight

depression in the ground.

Now this, to the present writer's mind at least, lifts the murder

212

The Invisible Man