Waram was silent, full of bitterness and disgust.  They went on again, and well down the springlike coils of the descent of Martigny they came upon the body of a man—­one of those wandering vendors of pocket-knives and key-rings, scissors and cheap watches.  He lay on his back on a low bank by the roadside.  His hat had rolled off into a pool of muddy water.  Doctor Waram saw, as he bent down to stare at the face, that the fellow looked like Grimshaw.  Not exactly, of course.  The nose was coarser—­it had not that Wellington spring at the bridge, nor the curved nostrils.  But it might have been a dirty, unshaven, dead Grimshaw lying there.  Waram told me that he felt a shock of gratification before he heard the poet’s voice behind him:  “What’s this?  A drunkard?” He shook his head and opened the dead man’s shirt to feel for any possible flutter of life in the heart.  There was none.  And he thought:  “If this were only Grimshaw!  If the whole miserable business were only done with.”

“By Jove!” Grimshaw said.  “The chap looks like me!  I thought I was the ugliest man in the world.  I know better...  D’you suppose he’s German, or Lombardian?  His hands are warm.  He must have been alive when the goatherd passed just now.  Nothing you can do?”

Waram stayed where he was, on his knees.  He tore his eyes away from the grotesque dead face and fixed them on Grimshaw.  He told me that the force of his desire must have spoken in that look because Grimshaw started and stepped back a pace, gripping his cane.  Then he laughed.  “Why not?” he said.  “Let this be me.  And I’ll go on, with that clanking hardware store around my neck.  It can be done, can’t it?  Better for you and for Dagmar.  I’m not being philanthropic.  I’m looking, not for a reprieve, but for release.  No one knows this fellow in Salvan—­he probably came up from the Rhone and was on his way to Chamonix.  What d’you think was the matter with him?”

“Heart,” Doctor Waram answered.

“Well, what d’you say?  This pedlar and I are social outcasts.  And there is Dagmar in England, weeping her eyes out because of divorce courts and more public washing of dirty linen.  You love her.  I don’t!  Why not carry this fellow to the rochers, to-night after dark?  To-morrow, when I have changed clothes with him, we can throw him into the valley.  It’s a good thousand feet or more.  Would there be much left of that face, for purposes of identification?  I think not.  You can take the mutilated body back to England and I can go on to Chamonix, as he would have gone.”  Grimshaw touched the pedlar with his foot.  “Free.”

That is exactly what they did.  The body, hidden near the roadside until nightfall, was carried through the woods to the rochers du soir, that little plateau on the brink of the tremendous wall of rock which rises from the Rhone valley to the heights near Salvan.  There the two men left it and returned to their hotel to sleep.