First Period First Narrative - Chapter XIX

I despatched the first woman-servant I could find to Rosanna's room; and
I sent the boy back to say that I myself would follow him with the boot.

This, I am well aware, was not the quickest way to take of obeying the
directions which I had received. But I was resolved to see for myself
what new mystification was going on before I trusted Rosanna's boot in
the Sergeant's hands. My old notion of screening the girl, if I could,
seemed to have come back on me again, at the eleventh hour. This state
of feeling (to say nothing of the detective-fever) hurried me off, as
soon as I had got the boot, at the nearest approach to a run which a man
turned seventy can reasonably hope to make.

As I got near the shore, the clouds gathered black, and the rain came
down, drifting in great white sheets of water before the wind. I heard
the thunder of the sea on the sand-bank at the mouth of the bay. A
little further on, I passed the boy crouching for shelter under the lee
of the sand hills. Then I saw the raging sea, and the rollers tumbling
in on the sand-bank, and the driven rain sweeping over the waters like a
flying garment, and the yellow wilderness of the beach with one solitary
black figure standing on it--the figure of Sergeant Cuff.

He waved his hand towards the north, when he first saw me. "Keep on that
side!" he shouted. "And come on down here to me!"