"Because," said Baring-Gould, addressing me as if I were a regrettably slow child, "the army uses it to practice with their guns. A fair portion of the moor is given over to them during the summer months, and is therefore off limits to the rambler and antiquarian. They do post the firing schedules at various places around the moor, and they are scrupulous about mounting the red warning flags, but it is really most inconvenient of them."

I sympathised, but privately I could see why the army should want to make use of Dartmoor: There was probably less life to disturb in that hand's-breadth of the map than on any other English ground south of Hadrian's Wall. Even the mapmakers seemed to have tired of the exercise before they penetrated to the middle, for most of the Gothic markings were along the edges. Or perhaps primitive man found the centre of the place too daunting even for him, I reflected. I suppressed a shiver.

"A farmworker on his way home from a celebration might not be considered the best of witnesses," Holmes noted drily, returning to the subject at hand. "How much had he drunk?"

"Quite a bit," Baring-Gould had to admit.

Holmes' only comment was with his eyebrows, but that was enough. He bent to study the map for a moment, then turned to a familiar packet, selected a map, and spread it with a flourish over the top of Baring-Gould's marked-up old sheet. He then withdrew a fountain pen from his breast pocket.

"The sighting of the coach around the time Gorton was last seen was here, would you say?"

Baring-Gould patted around his pockets until he remembered where he had put his spectacles, and pulled down one of the two pairs on his head and adjusted them on his nose. He peered at the crisp new map briefly, then pointed to a spot on the left side of the moor. Holmes put a neat circle on the place indicated, and then moved the pen over until it hovered near a Gothic-lettered notice of "hut circles."

"Gorton was last seen here?"

Baring-Gould seized the pen from Holmes impatiently and automatically extended it out as if to dip into a well before he caught himself, shook the thing hesitantly, and then wrote a firm X a bare fraction of an inch from where Holmes had held the nib. He then moved his hand the width of the moor to place another X near the hamlet of Buckfastleigh.

"He was found here," he said. "And these are where the coach was seen. The first sighting, as near as I can find, was in the middle of July, somewhere in this area here. That I know only through hearsay, but on August the twenty-fourth, two people saw it, and I spoke with them both. The third time was the fifteenth of September; that was the farmworker."

"And the dog?"

"What of the dog?"