Slain By The Doones | Page 4

comfort came in the morning. But I heard a great crying, sometime the next day, and ran back from the wood to learn what it meant, for there I had been searching up and down, not knowing whither I went or why. And lo, it was little Dick Hutchings at our door, and Deborah Pring held him by the coat-flap, and was beating him with one of my father's sticks.
"I tell 'ee, they Doo-uns has done for 'un," the boy was roaring betwixt his sobs; "dree on 'em, dree on 'em, and he've a killed one. The squire be layin' as dead as a sto-un."
Mrs. Pring smacked him on the mouth, for she saw that I had heard it. What followed I know not, for down I fell, and the sense of life went from me.
There was little chance of finding Thomas Pring, or any other man to help us, for neighbours were none, and Thomas was gone everywhere he could think of to look for them. Was I likely to wait for night again, and then talk for hours about it? I recovered my strength when the sun went low; and who was Deborah Pring, to stop me? She would have come, but I would not have it; and the strength of my grief took command of her.
Little Dick Hutchings whistled now, I remember that he whistled, as he went through the wood in front of me. Who had given him the breeches on his legs and the hat upon his shallow pate? And the poor little coward had skiddered away, and slept in a furze rick, till famine drove him home. But now he was set up again by gorging for an hour, and chattered as if he had done a great thing.
There must have been miles of rough walking through woods, and tangles, and craggy and black boggy hollows, until we arrived at a wide open space where two streams ran into one another.
"Thic be Oare watter," said the boy, "and t'other over yonner be Badgefry. Squire be dead up there; plaise, Miss Sillie, 'ee can goo vorrard and vaind 'un."
He would go no further; but I crossed the brook, and followed the Badgery stream, without knowing, or caring to know, where I was. The banks, and the bushes, and the rushing water went by me until I came upon--but though the Lord hath made us to endure such things, he hath not compelled us to enlarge upon them.
In the course of the night kind people came, under the guidance of Thomas Pring, and they made a pair of wattles such as farmers use for sheep, and carried home father and daughter, one sobbing and groaning with a broken heart, and the other that should never so much as sigh again. Troubles have fallen upon me since, as the will of the Lord is always; but none that I ever felt like that, and for months everything was the same to me.
But inasmuch as it has been said by those who should know better, that my father in some way provoked his merciless end by those vile barbarians, I will put into plainest form, without any other change, except from outlandish words, the tale received from Dick Hutchings, the boy, who had seen and heard almost everything while crouching in the water and huddled up inside a bush.
"Squire had catched a tidy few, and he seemed well pleased with himself, and then we came to a sort of a hollow place where one brook floweth into the other. Here he was a-casting of his fly, most careful, for if there was ever a trout on the feed, it was like to be a big one, and lucky for me I was keeping round the corner when a kingfisher bird flew along like a string-bolt, and there were three great men coming round a fuzz-bush, and looking at squire, and he back to them. Down goes I, you may say sure enough, with all of me in the water but my face, and that stuck into a wutts-clump, and my teeth making holes in my naked knees, because of the way they were shaking.
"'Ho, fellow!' one of them called out to squire, as if he was no better than father is, 'who give thee leave to fish in our river?'
"'Open moor,' says squire, 'and belongeth to the king, if it belongeth to anybody. Any of you gentlemen hold his majesty's warrant to forbid an old officer of his?'
"That seemed to put them in a dreadful rage, for to talk of a warrant was unpleasant to them.
"'Good fellow, thou mayest spin spider's webs, or jib up and down like a gnat,' said one, 'but such tricks are not lawful upon land of ours. Therefore render up thy spoil.'
"Squire walked