“I can believe it all,” said Medlicot, “and am very sorry that it should be so.  But I can not see the justice of punishing a man on the merest, vaguest suspicion.  Your only ground for imputing this crime to him is that your own conduct to him may have given him a motive.”

Harry had schooled himself vigorously during the ride as to his own demeanor, and had resolved that he would be cool.  “I was going on to tell you,” he said, “what occurred that night after I saw you up by the fence.”  Then he described how he and his boy had entered the shed, and had both seen and heard a man as he escaped from it; how the boy had at once declared that the man was Nokes; how the following day he had discovered the leaves, which Nokes no doubt had deposited there just before the rain, intending to burn the place at once; and how Nokes’s manner to him within the last half hour had corroborated his suspicions.

“Is he the boy you call Jacko?”

“That’s the name he goes by.”

“You don’t know his real name?”

“I have never heard any other name.”

“Nor any thing about him?” Harry owned, in answer to half a dozen such questions, that Jacko had come to Gangoil about six months ago—­ he did not know whence—­had been kept for a week’s job, and had then been allowed to remain about the place without any regular wages.  “You admit it was quite dark,” continued Medlicot.

Harry did not at all like the cross-examination, and his resolution to be cool was quickly fading.  “I told you that I saw myself the figure of a man.”

“But that you barely saw a figure.  You did not form any opinion of your own as to the man’s identity.”

Harry Heathcote was as honest as the sun.  Much as he disliked being cross-examined, he found himself compelled not only to say the exact truth, but the whole truth.  “Certainly not.  I barely saw a glimpse of a figure, and, till I spoke to Nokes just now, I almost doubted whether the lad could have distinguished him.  I am sure he was right now.”

“Really, Mr. Heathcote, I can’t go along with you.  You are accusing a man of committing an offense, which I believe is capital, on the evidence of a boy of whom you know nothing, who may have his own reasons for spiting the man, and whom you yourself did not believe till you had looked this man in the face.  I think you allow yourself to be guided too much by your own power of intuition.”

“No, I don’t,” said Harry, who hated his neighbor’s methodical argument.

“At any rate, I can’t consent to take a man’s bread out of his mouth, and to send him away tainted as he would be with this suspicion, either because Jacko thought that he saw him in the dark, or because--”

“I have never asked you to send him away.”

“What is it you want, then?”

“I want to have him watched, so that he may feel that if he attempts to destroy my property his guilt will be detected.”