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.
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