“Mrs. Unthank has not been in this house for many months. From the day she left until last night, so far as I can gather, nothing has been heard of this ghost, or beast, or whatever it is.”
“That do seem queer, surely,” Middleton admitted.
Dominey followed the tracks with his eyes to the wood and back again.
“Middleton,” he said, “I am learning something about spirits. It seems that they not only make tracks, but they require feeding. Perhaps if that is so they can feel a charge of shot inside them.”
The old man seemed for a moment to stiffen with slow horror.
“You wouldn't shoot at it, Squire?” he gasped.
“I should have done so this morning if I had had a chance,” Dominey replied. “When the weather is a little drier, I am going to make my way into that wood, Middleton, with a rifle under my arm.”
“Then as God's above, you'll never come out, Squire!” was the solemn reply.
“We will see,” Dominey muttered. “I have hacked my way through some queer country in Africa.”
“There's nowt like this wood in the world, sir,” the old man asserted doggedly. “The bottom's rotten from end to end and the top's all poisonous. The birds die there on the trees. It's chockful of reptiles and unclean things, with green and purple fungi, two feet high, with poison in the very sniff of them. The man who enters that wood goes to his grave.”