"No more 'twill, an' I'll come 'long with 'e myself this minute," answered the other.
Getting a key to the padlock, and a big birch broom, he returned with
Barron, and soon had the doors of the disused byre thrown open to the air.
"I shut en up when the auld goat went dead. Theer a used to lie in the corner, but now he'm outside, an' I doubt the piskeys, what they talks 'bout, be mighty savage wi' me for not buryin' the beast, 'cause all fairies is 'dicted to goats, they do say, an' mighty fond o' the milk of 'em."
Farmer Ford soon cleared the place of potatoes, sacks, and tools. Then, taking his broom, he made a clean sweep of dust and dirt.
"Theer's a many more rats here than I knawed seemin'ly," he said, as he examined a sink in the stones of the floor, used for draining the stalls; "they come up here for sartain, an' runs out 'long the heydge to the mangel-wurzel mound, I lay."
Without, evidences of the vermin were clear enough. Long hardened tracks, patted down by many paws, ran this way and that; and the main rat thoroughfare extended, as the farmer foretold, to a great mound where, stowed snugly in straw under earth, lay packed the remains of a mangel-wurzel crop. At one end the store had been opened and drawn upon for winter use; but a goodly pile of the great tawny globes still remained, small lemon-colored leaves sprouting from them. Farmer Ford, however, viewed the treasure without satisfaction.
"Us killed a power o' sheep wi' they blarsted roots last winter," he said. "You'd never think now as the frost could touch 'em, but it did though, awin' to the wicked long winter. It got to 'em, sure 'nough, an' theer was frost in 'em when us gived 'em to the sheep, an' it rotted theer innards, poor twoads, an' they died, more'n a score."
Barron listened thoughtfully to these details, then pointed to an ugly sight beyond the wurzel mound.
"I should like that removed," he said.
It was the dead goat, withered to a mummy almost, with horns and hide intact, and a rat-way bored through the body of the beast under a tunnel of its ribs.