Could the Doctor be mistaken, and was Tom's death the simple result of
his fall over the Coupee? The Doctor's pronouncement, however, seemed
to leave no loophole of hope there.
If not, then who had killed Tom, and why?
He could think of no one. He could imagine no reason for it.
Tom had been a bully at home, but outside he was on jovial terms with
his fellows--except only himself. He had to acknowledge to himself the
seeming justice of the popular feeling. If any man in Sark might, with
some show of reason, have been suspected of the killing of Tom Hamon, it
was himself.
Once, by reason of overmuch groping in the dark, an awful doubt came
upon him--was it possible that, in some horrible wandering of the mind,
of which he remembered nothing, he had actually done this thing? Done it
unconsciously, in some over-boiling of hot blood into the brain, which
in its explosion had blotted out every memory of what had passed?
It was a hideous idea, born of over-strain and overmuch groping after
non-existent threads in a blind alley.
He tried to get outside himself, and follow Stephen Gard that night and
see if that terrible thing could have been possible to him.
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