WANTED--A PENNY IN THE SLOT
When I came to myself the moon had risen--risen good and high, too--for
it showed well above the orchard wall where it was broken, and over the
palisades with which Hobby Stennis had mended it with his own hand.
Elsie was seated by me. She had opened up my coat, and undone my
waistcoat and shirt at the neck. There was a pleasant coolness, and
she was slopping about with a wet handkerchief--not very big, indeed,
being one of her own, and better adapted for dabbing dry girls' eyes,
than for recovering a man out of a faint.
I sat up.
"How did you come here?" I said.
"How did you?" she answered, very shortly; "lie still!"
"Shan't!"
"Still in the sulks?"
"I say, Elsie, what was _that_?"
"What?"
I was looking all about, you may be sure, and a little way off under
the shadow of the great broken-down gates of the orchard, I saw a heap
lie darkly, curiously loose and stretched out, a kind of wisp in the
form of a man, something like a Guy Fawkes dragged through water
instead of fire.
I pointed to it. The head, to my eyes at least, still glowed faintly
phosphorescent.
"_That!_" I said briefly.
"That," said Elsie calmly, "is Mad Jeremy!"
I started up on my elbow in great astonishment.
"Then he wasn't dead after all, when he jumped into the water from the
top of the tower the morning of the burning?"
"It seems not--it was only a little habit of his," said Elsie calmly,
"but he is now! _I_ killed him."
"Why?"
"Because he would have killed you, if I had not! He was waiting for
you to pass. Only, as it happened, I had been waiting longest. I knew
you were in the sulks, and came to find you. Besides--he killed my
grandfather."
"But your grandfather----"
"No matter--he _was_ my grandfather!"
"And what did you kill him with?" I was sitting up now, quite myself,
and intensely curious. Elsie always says that merely wanting to know
will restore me quicker than a whole apothecaries' hall.
She affected not to hear.
"You can't do without me after all!" she taunted. "I know."
"Don't you mind having killed him?" I asked. As for me I should have
been fairly cut out of my mind if I had done as much.
"Of course I care," she answered; "didn't I tell you he killed my
grandfather?"
Then it was that I began to believe that after all there was something
in blood. And I resolved, there and then, that when Elsie and I were
married I should behave, and give her no cause to take an odd shot at
me.
"But what did you do it with?" It was the second time of asking.
"Dum-dum!" said she.
"What!" I cried; "then my father gave you that beautiful long-barrelled
Webley he took from me?"
"Well, don't sulk about it--there's no time!" she cried. "Of course he
gave it to me--as soon as you had gone out--said I might need it, with
all the excitement among the Bewick pit folk. So I had a special
pocket made for it, and I have carried it about ever since. This is
the first chance I've had, though!"
I looked at her in astonishment. This was the girl who was afraid of
mice.
"But don't you mind--_that_?" I pointed over my shoulder at the heap
under the archway. The moon was creeping upward towards the zenith,
and the light had now illuminated the dark face and wet, snaky curls of
that which had been Mad Jeremy. I went nearer to look at him. I
wanted to make sure that he was indeed dead.
The bullet had entered a trifle behind one ear, traversed the base of
the skull, and come out by the opposite temple. This time there was no
mistake--the creature was dead.
Two little crosses of white caught my eye, one over each bullet hole.
She saw me bend down to examine them.
"That's the Geneva pattern," she said calmly. "It's plaster from my
'First Aid to the Wounded' case. I always carry it--so convenient.
Now let us go back and tell Mr. Yarrow!"
"Before we start," I said, "I think you had better give me that pistol,
and after this you stick to your First Aids!"
"If I had stuck to my First Aids," she retorted, "you wouldn't have
needed any aids--first, second, or third!"
However, she handed over the revolver, "not (as she said) because she
was afraid of it, but because it weighed down her pocket so much it was
making her walk lopsided!"
* * * * *
There is ever so much to tell--about how Elsie and I quarrelled and
made up--that of course. How Mr. Yarrow, senior, would and Mrs. Yarrow
wouldn't. How my mother pestered me about Harriet Caw, and Mr. Mustard
pestered Elsie on his own account. Then, there is all about how we
were at last rid of the Caw girls, Harriet and Constantia both, and who
rid us of them. That is a ripping part. There isn't so much battle,
murder, and sudden death in all this, but it's even more interesting,
especially the part where Elsie and I decided to take our fate into our
own hands. It all came right enough in the end, of course, or I
shouldn't be writing like this, looking out on the sheep pasturing on
the Cheviot slopes, and listening to the whaups crying.
But for certain private reasons Elsie and I want a little more money
this year. She is sewing away like a house on fire, with her feet on
the fender by the hearth. So if you want to know about it, just pester
some editor man to get us to write it all out for him. And we will do
it gladly.
As for me, I am working up quite a good business connection on this
side of the border for my father. You see, Elsie couldn't stand the
neighbourhood of Breckonside and Deep Moat Grange after what had
happened. And, indeed, I don't blame her. Her opinion on mice, black
beetles, and the two Caw girls, particularly Harriet, is still
unchanged--even though Harriet--but there, I really _can't_ go on with
the story without another penny in the slot.
It is quite enough to say that Aphra Orrin got imprisonment for life in
an asylum for criminal lunatics, that I got Elsie, and that Elsie seems
in a fair way to get what will take her thoughts, once and for all, off
the gloomy woods and terrible waters which surround the house of Deep
Moat Grange.
THE END
_Butler and Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London_