The Greatest Works of J. S. Fletcher (64+ Titles in One Illustrated Edition). J. S. Fletcher

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СКАЧАТЬ and ancient cucumber frame, half-hidden in a corner of the privet hedge. Most of the glass was gone, and what remained was broken; within there appeared to be nothing but a pile of straw, upon which two or three old guano sacks were carelessly tossed. The lurcher, thrusting his scarred muzzle between the cracked panes of glass, changed his sniffing to a whine, and his whine to louder complainings.

      "Nothing to be seen here," announced the gamekeeper from the roof of the lean-to. "There's the bed, and it's made, in a fashion, but there's nothing either in or on or under it. No, nothing to see, missis, so—what's that dog up to?"

      The lurcher turned his disreputable head towards his master, lifted a paw, and complained more loudly than ever. Justice came slowly down, and went across to the cucumber frame, still followed by Mrs. Graddige. He, too, began to sniff. And, suddenly brushing the dog aside and lifting up the lid of the frame, he turned away the sacks and revealed, lying in rows upon the straw, the carcasses of a quantity of rabbits. The lurcher, unreproved, thrust his nose into them: Justice and Tibby Graddige moved further back.

      "Phew!" exclaimed Justice. "I thought he smelled something. These must have been here a couple of days or more. Six—twelve—eighteen—two dozen of 'em. Poached, of course. Ah!"

      Mrs. Graddige, who had held her nose in the corner of her apron, released it.

      "Well, did ye iver see the like o' that, mestur!" she exclaimed. "The idea of a peaceable-behaved man like yon theer goin' out o' nights a-powchin'! Eh, theer is a deal o' wickedness i' this world! I expect this'll be a lockin'-up job for him, mestur, weern't it? I suppose they can't hang him, same as they did i' t' good owd days, can they?"

      The gamekeeper made no immediate reply. He had picked up a stick, and was turning the dead rabbits over, examining their feet, looking at the lighter coloured fur under their bodies. There was a good deal of soil on both fur and feet, and he knew at once from what particular part of the parish the rabbits had been brought.

      "They'll very likely hang, draw and quarter him, missis," he answered. And, still using the stick, he replaced the sacks, and drove away the lurcher. "That is, if he's caught. Now, when did you see him last?"

      "As I telled Mestur Uscroft, o' Sunday afternoon, when he were drinkin' his tea, which t' pot is still on t' table" replied Mrs. Graddige. "An' since then I've neither heard nor seen owt o' t' man. An' I'll tell you what I'm thinkin', mestur—if so be as he went out powchin' o' nights, which is what I should never ha' given him credit for, happen he's gotten hissen caught fast in a snare, or happen he's tumm'led down a hole in t' woods, and can't get away fro' neyther one nor t'other, and there he's starvin' to death, and him wi' nowt to eat sin' Sunday!"

      Justice picked up his gun and moved off.

      "You keep your mouth shut, missis," he said over his shoulder, as he went out of the garden. "Say nothing to anybody about these rabbits, nor about me, either. Or happen you'll get hanged, too, as an accomplice after the fact."

      He went away, laughing, down the lane which led to the street. But as he returned to his house at the other end of the village, Justice thought seriously of what he had discovered—and, knowing that the rabits had come from the sandy-soiled retreats of Badger's Hollow, he determined on beginning an all-night vigil there that very evening. It appeared to him that Pippany Webster had probably some refuge in the woods, whereat he was finding it convenient to remain hidden for a day or two. And having a profound belief in his own cleverness and sagacity, Justice kept his knowledge to himself, and said nothing of his strangely-acquired information even to the policeman, and it was by himself, and unaccompanied by his dog, that he set out that night, by devious ways, to the lonely spot where Taffendale and Rhoda Perris were in the habit of keeping tryst.

Chapter XIII

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      Whoever, strange to the district, had come upon Taffendale's Limepits in the darkness of the night, might well have been excused if for the moment he had fancied himself dreaming of the bivouac which follows a long day's battle, when camp-fires are lighted, and spirals of smoke-stained flame wind upwards to a silent sky. Taffendale's Limepits were out of the world; there was a high-road within a mile and a half of them and an occupation road which communicated with it; there was also a railway near at hand, but the railway only touched the pits by a deep-sunk siding; the occupation road was equally sunk between high banks and thick hedgerows; the Limepits, unlike Taffendale's farm, which stood high on the uplands above, were hidden and unsuspected until you came to where the air, whether of a spring morning or a winter night, was always sharp with the acrid pungency of the burning lime. You perceived that pungency in your nostrils before you came to Taffendale's; however strong the scent of the new-mown hay in the adjacent meadows might be, however fragrant the freshness of the new-blown roses in the hedge, the clear, keen smell of the lime was paramount. Yet you saw nothing of this place until it suddenly showed itself at your feet; then you found yourself confronting a great, wide-spread cavity in the surface of the land; a sort of waterless lake sunk deep down beneath the level of the fields and woods, and all around its seamed and scarred sides the masses of limestone which men had forced out with pick or explosive, and in its midst conical heaps of the stone, built up symmetrically, like great beehives, with a bright fire glowing and crackling at the base of each, and from the apex a curling shaft of blue-grey smoke winding, day and night, while the lime burned, into the upper air.

      This was Taffendale's Limepits—a little world in itself. To look more closely into its geography was to see that it had two hemispheres, like the greater world on whose surface it made so minute a speck. Men had delved and dug and scratched and burrowed into this quarry for so many generations that one-half of it had become exhausted; the womb once so generous in gift could give no more. And in that half Nature had asserted herself in her usual fashion. The scarred sides had become covered over with shrub and plant and flower; the burnt-out kilns had been transformed into mounds and knolls, whereon silver daisies and golden buttercups made stars in the grass; the uneven floor of the quarry was no longer a wilderness of stone and rubble, but luxuriant enough of rye grass and clover to afford cropping-ground for a donkey here and a goat there. And here, in rudely-fashioned, one-storeyed cottages, built out of the stone, the lime-burners lived. This worn-out, fully-worked scar, now given over to green things, was the barracks of the tiny army which ceaselessly tore wider and deeper scars into the unworked land beyond.

      In the eyes of the folk who lived round about them in the neighbouring villages Taffendale's lime-burners were a strange lot. They were a people within a people. They kept themselves almost exclusively to themselves. There were not very many of them: some seven or eight families in all. As a rule they married amongst themselves; if a young lime-burner brought in a wife from outside she was a long time on approbation; whenever a young woman went away to service, or married one of the village lads (an unusual circumstance, seeing that villagers and lime-burners were always at variance), she left Taffendale's for ever. Now and then the men visited one or other of the inns and ale-houses in the district, or repaired to the market-town; on these occasions they went in a gang—no lime-burner was ever known to go on such an expedition by himself. And if they were aroused by villager or townsman at such times, they were more than quick to fight—and then it was ill work for the men who were adventurous enough to stand up to them. They were big, brawny, great-boned fellows, half-savage, wholly careless, good-looking in a devil-may-care fashion, and their isolated lives bound them as closely together as the ties of blood which were already theirs. And their women were of the same sort—fine, strapping, Amazon-like creatures, who had a wild beauty of their own, and were not unconscious of it, but were much prouder of the strength that enabled them, if it were necessary, to take a place alongside their men-folk with pick and shovel, or to wheel heavily-weighted barrows up the long planks which led to the newly-building kilns.

      On the morning following Justice's СКАЧАТЬ