But the man’s nephew explained.  “That ain’t all, Uncle Amos,” he went on, “for I found Uncle Joe’s hat alongside the place!  There it lies still and little the worse—­blue jay feather and all.  But I dursn’t touch it for fear of the law, and seeing it just after I’d found the hole, filled me with fear and terror.  Because it looks cruel as if Uncle had pretty near got home that fatal night, and coming across by the field path in the dark, got in the rough and went down the pit.”

Well, Amos had reached for his boots you may be sure before Ernest was to the end of his tale, and in five minutes he’d put on his coat and gone out with Ernest to see the spot.

Their eyes soon got used to the starlight, and by the time they reached the field called Four Acre, Amos was seeing pretty clear.  In one corner where a field path ran from a stile down the side, was a stony hillock dotted with blackthorns and briars and all overgrown with nettles, and in the midst of it, sure enough, time and weather had broke open a hole as went down into the bowels of the earth beneath.  And beside this hole, little the worse for five weeks in the open, lay Joe Gregory’s billycock hat.

Amos fetched a box of matches out of his pocket, struck one and looked at the hat.  Then he peered down into the black pit alongside, and, as he did so, he felt a heavy push from behind, and he was gone—­falling down into darkness and death afore he knew what had happened.  And in that awful moment, such a terrible strange thing be man’s mind, it weren’t fear of death and judgment, nor yet horror of the smash that must happen when he got to the bottom, that gripped Gregory’s brain:  it was just a feeling of wild anger against himself, that he’d ever been such a fool as to trust a man with a glide in his eye!

In the fraction of time as passed, while he was falling, his wits moved like lightning, and he saw, not only what had happened, but why it had happened.  He saw that Ernest Gregory knew all about Joe and had probably done him in five weeks ago; and he saw likewise that now it was his turn to be murdered.  Then Vitifer and Furze Hill would both belong to the young man.  All this Amos saw; and he felt also a dreadful, conquering desire to tell the people what had happened and be revenged; and he told himself that his ghost should come to Merripit if he had to break out of hell to come, and give his friends no rest till they was laid upon the track of his nephew.

All that worked through his brain in an instant moment, like things happen in a dream, and then he was brought up sudden and fell so light that he knew he weren’t dead yet, but heard something crack at the same moment.  And then Amos discovered he was on a rotten landing-stage of old timber, with the shaft hole above him and a head, outlined against the stars, looking down, and another hole extending below.  He was, in fact, catched half-way to his doom and hung there with the