“Is that it?”
He looked at me a moment before he answered. Through all his heartiness there was a queer suggestion of craft in the fellow’s face that puzzled me.
“It might be for its state,” he said, “but it isn’t. You may as soon grow beans in snow as grass on a murdered marn’s grave.”
“Does a murdered man lie there?”
“Ay. A matter of ten year ago, it may be. He wur found one summer morn in a ditch by the battery yon, and his skull split wi’ a billhook. Nubbody to this day knows his name or him as did it.”
A grim tragedy to end in this quiet garden of death. We moved on again, not so far, and my guide pointed down.
“There he lies,” he said.
A poor shallow little heap of rough soil grown compact with years. A few blades of rank grass standing up from it, starved and stiff like the bristles on a hog’s back. All around the barrows stretched green and kindly. Only here and on that other were sordid desolation. No stone, no boards, no long-lifeless flower even to emphasize the irony of an epitaph. Nothing but entire indifference and the withering footmark of time.
“I mind the day,” said the sexton. “Looking ower the hedge yon I see Vokes’ pig running, wi’ a straw in’s mouth. ‘We shall have rain,’ says I, and rain it did wi’ a will. Three o’ them came wi’ the coffin—the old marn and a young ’un—him ’ud be your brother now—and the long doctor fro’ Chis’ll. In the arternoon, as I was garthering up my tools, the old marn come back by hisself and chucked a sprig o’ verv’n on the mound. ‘Oho,’ thinks I. ‘That’ll be to keep the devil fro’ walking.’ The storm druv up while he wur starnding there and sent him scuttling. I tuk shelter i’ the church, and when I come out by and by, there wur the witch-weed gone—washed fro’ the grave, you’ll say, and I’ll not contradict ye; but the devil knows his own.”
“What do you mean?”