“Ah, the poor body! his was a wisht case,” a woman observed from the corner furthest from the door.

“Ay, Selina, and fast forgotten, like all the doin’s and sufferin’s of the men of old time.”  He reached a hand round his basket, and touching me on the knee, pointed back on Tregarrick.  “There’s a wall,” he said, and I saw by the direction of his finger that he meant the wall of the county prison, “and beneath that wall’s a road, and across that road’s a dismal pool, and beyond that pool’s a green hillside, with a road athurt it that comes down and crosses by the pool’s head.  Standin’ ’pon that hillside you can see a door in the wall, twenty feet above the ground, an’ openin’ on nothing.  Leastways, you could see it once; an’ even now, if ye’ve good eyesight, ye can see where they’ve bricked it up.”

I could, in fact, even at our distance, detect the patch of recent stone-work; and knew something of its history.

“Now,” the old man continued, “turn your looks to the right and mark the face of Tregarrick town-clock.  You see it, hey?”—­and I had time to read the hour on its dial before Boutigo jolted us over the ridge and out of sight of it—­“Well, carry them two things in your mind:  for they mazed Dan’l Best an’ murdered his brother Hughie.”

And, much as I shall repeat it, he told me this tale, pausing now and again to be corroborated by the woman in the corner.  The history, my dear reader, is accurate enough—­for Boutigo’s van.

There lived a young man in Tregarrick in the time of the French War.  His name was Dan’l Best, and he had an only brother Hughie, just three years younger than himself.  Their father and mother had died of the small-pox and left them, when quite young children, upon the parish:  but old Walters of the Packhorse—­he was great-grandfather of the Walters that keeps it now—­took a liking to them and employed them, first about his stables and in course of time as post-boys.  Very good post-boys they were, too, till Hughie took to drinking and wenching and cards and other devil’s tricks.  Dan’l was always a steady sort:  walked with a nice young woman that was under-housemaid up to the old Lord Bellarmine’s at Castle Cannick, and was saving up to be married, when Hughie robbed the mail.

Hughie robbed the mail out of doubt.  He did it up by Tippet’s Barrow, just beyond the cross-roads where the scarlet gig used to meet the coach and take the mails for Castle Cannick and beyond to Tolquite.  Billy Phillips, that drove the gig, was found in the ditch with his mouth gagged, and swore to Hughie’s being the man.  The Lord Chief Justice, too, summed up dead against him, and the jury didn’t even leave the box.  And the moral was, “Hughie Best, you’re to be taken to the place whence you come from, ancetera, and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul!”