“You were there?” I exclaimed.

“Snug behind the hedge in front of which you planted yourself,” he answered.  “And if you want to know what I was doing there, I’ll tell you.  I was doing—­or had been doing—­a bit of poaching.  And, as I say, what you saw, I saw!”

“Then I’ll ask you a question, Mr. Crone,” I said.  “Why haven’t you told, yourself?”

“Aye!” he said.  “You may well ask me that.  But I wasn’t called as a witness at yon inquest.”

“You could have come forward,” I suggested.

“I didn’t choose,” he retorted.

We both looked at each other again, and while we looked he swigged off his drink and helped himself, just as generously, to more.  And, as I was getting bolder by that time, I set to work at questioning him.

“You’ll be attaching some importance to what you saw?” said I.

“Well,” he replied slowly, “it’s not a pleasant thing—­for a man’s safety—­to be as near as what he was to a place where another man’s just been done to his death.”

“You and I were near enough, anyway,” I remarked.

“We know what we were there for,” he flung back at me.  “We don’t know what he was there for.”

“Put your tongue to it, Mr. Crone,” I said boldly.  “The fact is, you suspicion him?”

“I suspicion a good deal, maybe,” he admitted.  “After all, even a man of that degree’s only a man, when all’s said and done, and there might be reasons that you and me knows nothing about.  Let me ask you a question,” he went on, edging nearer at me across the table.  “Have you mentioned it to a soul?”

I made a mistake at that, but he was on me so sharp, and his manner was so insistent, that I had the word out of my lips before I thought.

“No!” I replied.  “I haven’t.”

“Nor me,” he said.  “Nor me.  So—­you and me are the only two folk that know.”

“Well?” I asked.

He took another pull at his liquor and for a moment or two sat silent, tapping his finger-nails against the rim of the glass.

“It’s a queer business, Moneylaws,” he said at last.  “Look at it anyway you like, it’s a queer business!  Here’s one man, yon lodger of your mother’s, comes into the town and goes round the neighbourhood reading the old parish registers and asking questions at the parson’s—­aye, and he was at it both sides of the Tweed—­I’ve found that much out for myself!  For what purpose?  Is there money at the back of it—­property—­something of that sort, dependent on this Gilverthwaite unearthing some facts or other out of those old books?  And then comes another man, a stranger, that’s as mysterious in his movements as Gilverthwaite was, and he’s to meet Gilverthwaite at a certain lonely spot, and at a very strange hour, and Gilverthwaite can’t go, and he gets you to go, and you find the man—­murdered!  And—­close by—­you’ve seen this other man, who, between you and me—­though it’s no secret—­is as much a stranger to the neighbourhood as ever Gilverthwaite was or Phillips was!”