The sight of his act drove him
away; not craven fear of an arrest. If the Le Geyts kill themselves--a
seafaring race on the whole--their impulse is to trust to water."
"And the other thing?"
"Well, that was about the mountaineer's homing instinct. I have often
noticed it. I could give you fifty instances, only I didn't like to
speak of them before Lina. There was Williams, for example, the Dolgelly
man who killed a game-keeper at Petworth in a poaching affray; he was
taken on Cader Idris, skulking among rocks, a week later. Then there
was that unhappy young fellow, Mackinnon, who shot his sweetheart at
Leicester; he made, straight as the crow flies, for his home in the
Isle of Skye, and there drowned himself in familiar waters. Lindner, the
Tyrolese, again, who stabbed the American swindler at Monte Carlo,
was tracked after a few days to his native place, St. Valentin, in
the Zillerthal. It is always so. Mountaineers in distress fly to their
mountains. It is a part of their nostalgia. I know it from within, too:
if _I_ were in poor Hugo LeGeyt's place, what do you think I would do?
Why, hide myself at once in the greenest recesses of our Carnarvonshire
mountains.
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