“What?” growled the thatcher with unusual ferocity.
“Coorse I’m not disputing what you’re saying, but he never did such a thing in his life.”
“Then you calls me a liar?”
“Certainly not. O no, don’t misunderstand me, but Henry Turley never did any such thing, I can’t believe it of him.”
“Huh! I be telling you facts, and facts be true one way or another. Now you waunts to call over me, you waunts to know the rights of everything and the wrongs of nothing.”
“Well,” said the mild-faced man, pushing his pot toward the teller of tales, “I might believe it to-morrow, but it’s a bit of a twister now, this minute!”
“Ah, that’s all right then”—the thatcher was completely mollified. “Well the worst part of the case was his brother Mark. Shadrach served him shameful, treated him like a dog. (Good health!) Ah, like a dog. Mark was older nor him, about seventy, and he lived by himself in a little house out by the hanging pust, not much of a cottage, it warn’t—just wattle and daub wi’ a thetch o’ straa'—but the lease was running out (‘twas a lifehold affair) and unless he bought this little house for fifty pound he’d got to go out of it. Well, old Mark hadn’t got no fifty pounds, he was ate up wi’ rheumatics and only did just a little light labour in the woods, they might as well a’ asked him for the King’s crown, so he said to his master: Would he lend him the fifty pounds?
“‘No, I can’t do that,’ his master says.
“‘You can reduct it from my wages,’ Mark says.
“‘Nor I can’t do that neither,’ says his master, ‘but there’s your brother Henry, he’s worth a power o’ money, ask him.‘ So Mark asks Shadrach to lend him the fifty pounds, so’s he could buy this little house. ’No,’ says Henry, ‘I can’t.’ Nor he wouldn’t. Well—old Mark says to him: ‘I doan wish you no harm Henry,’ he says, ‘but I hope as how you’ll die in a ditch.’ (Good health!) And sure enough he did. That was his own brother, he were strooken wi’ the sun and died in a ditch, Henry did, and when he was buried his fortune was buried with him, in a little canister, holding it in his hand, I reckons. And a lot of good that was to him! He hadn’t been buried a month when two bad parties putt their heads together. Levi Carter, one was, he was the sexton, a man that was half a loony as I always thought. O yes, he had got all his wits about him, somewheres, only they didn’t often get much of a quorum, still he got them—somewheres. T’other was a chap by the name of Impey, lived in Slack the shoemaker’s house down by the old traveller’s garden. He wasn’t much of a mucher, helped in the fieldwork and did shepherding at odd times. And these two chaps made up their minds to goo and collar Henry Turley’s fortune out of his coffin one night and share it between theirselves. ’Twas crime, ye know, might a been prison for life, but this Impey was a bad lot—he’d the manners of a pig, pooh! filthy!—and I expects he persuaded old Levi on to do it. Bad as body-snatchen, coorse ’twas!