They run at the top of their speed in their clumsy oilskins. They reach the cliff directly over the fatal rock. They look down, around, at one another. Both start back with cries of surprise and horror.
Neither man spoke. Phelan's amazement had bereft him of words. He knew the place thoroughly. He had known and feared it from his earliest years. To left and right were perpendicular cliffs. In front stretched the evil Black Rock. From where they stood descended the pathway to the table rock below. On the broken ground around them was nothing taller than dwarf bushes, which could not conceal a goat and to reach which the sure-footedness of a goat would have been needed. In his youth Phelan had been as bold as any lad in the village. But neither he nor any other lad of the village had ever dared to tempt death on those steep, friable, rotten slopes.
Beyond all doubt he had seen the figure of a man disappear over this cliff a few moments ago. Where was he--it--now? The Black Rock lay bare, naked, at their feet. A man's head could not be hidden there. Whither had that figure gone? It could not have reached the sea in the time. The monster had not yet broken loose, and the man could not have been swept into the water. No shattered corpse lay on the greasy rock beneath. A man cannot fly. What had become of this man? Or had they seen a ghost?
He turned to O'Brien and noticed that the latter looked pale and scared.
"You saw him?" he shouted above the storm. "You saw him as plain as daylight?"
Once more Phelan looked carefully around him. Absolutely no trace of man was to be seen. Except for their presence, the place might have been alone since the making of the world. He again turned to O'Brien.
"Heaven be between us and all harm, but it must have been a ghost!"
"He could not have got to the Hole in the time."
"Did you ever see Fahey? Of course you did. You told me about him."
The two men looked mutely into each other's faces. Anything like a regular conversation was now impossible owing to the force and noise of the storm.
O'Brien had had a theory. The events of the last two minutes had shattered his theory to atoms. The two policemen who had seen Fahey jump into the Hole had not been mistaken. It was no ghost they saw. They had tracked their man as surely as they had ever tracked any one on whom they laid hands. He, being innocent, was suspected of a crime; or, rather, he had innocently, in ignorance, committed a criminal act, and being pursued and hard pressed, had flung himself headlong into that awful pit. Within a couple of weeks or so, O'Hanlon had seen that same figure in this place, and now he (O'Brien) had seen such a figure, and Phelan had identified it. This was monstrous. What came of all his inquiries respecting the Whalers Mouth and the accessibility of the cave? Nothing--absolutely nothing. His theory was childish. He was glad he had spoken of it to no man.