He leaned upon his spade and criticised me.
“You sing at it, don’t you?”
“Mebbe I do. Men sing sometimes, I’ve heard, when they’ve got the horrors on ’em.”
“Have you got the horrors, then?”
“Not in the sense o’ drink, though mayhap I’ve had them, too, in my time.”
He lifted his cap to scratch his forehead and resumed his former position.
“Look’ee here,” he said. “I stand in a grave, I do. I’ve dug two fut down. He could wake to a whisper so be as you laid him there. Did he lift his arm, his fingers ’ud claw in the air like a forked rardish. I go a fut deeper—and he’d struggle to bust himself out, and, not succeeding, there’d be a little swelling in the soil above there cracked like the top of a loaf. I go another fut, and he’s safe to lie, but he’d hear arnything louder than a bart’s whistle yet. At two yard he’ll rot as straight and dumb as a dead arder.”
“What then?” I said.
“What then? Why, this: Digging here, week in, week out, I thinks to myself, what if they buried me six feet deep some day before the life was out o’ me.”
“Why should they?”