“What boy was that?” I said, in a forced voice, when I could command myself.
“What boy?—eh?—what boy?” His eyes were wandering up and down the wall again. “Him, I say, as they burried quick—young Trender o’ the mill.”
“How do you know he was buried alive? How could he have been if he was murdered?”
“How do I know? He were murdered, I say. I’m George White, the sexton—and what I knows, I knows.”
“And the doctor murdered him?”
“Don’t I say so?”
He had hardly spoken, when he put his hand to his head, moved a step back and stood staring at me with horror-stricken, injected eyes.
“My God!” he muttered. “He whispered there into the pit that if I said to another what I said to him I were as good as a dead man.”
The panic increased in him. I could see the tortured soul moving, as it were, behind the flesh of his face. When the nerve of endurance snapped he staggered and fell forward in a fit.
Helpless to minister to a convulsion that must find its treatment in the delirium ward of a hospital, I ran to the police station, which was but a short distance away, and gave information of the seizure I had witnessed. A stretcher was sent for the poor, racked wretch; he was carried away spluttering and writhing, and so for the time being my chance of questioning him further was ended.