“We’ll go by Flint Stone Quarry in the east woods,” he said, “for there it was that more birds were killed last night. You’d think the anointed ruffians had done enough; but they be at it still. ’Twas a great roosting-place—very thick and warm, with snug shelter from north and east. They might have killed scores o’ dozens for all me an’ the new keeper could do. For all I know, they did. Of course when us got there all was silent as the grave; but Thomas went again first thing this morning and found one dead bird an’ one lamed but living, stuck in a tree fork. An’ there was feathers everywhere an’ marks of feet. Ten pounds worth of birds at least they took.”
The girl listened quietly.
“Maybe ’tis the old hands, father?”
“Or new ones, as have larned their wicked tricks from my dead son.”
“I shall never love you while you say these things against Daniel.”
The keeper did not answer. He was surveying the glaring evidence of another poaching raid. A stone quarry stood in the centre of heavy woods here, and gleamed white with flint and yellow with gravel where it had been gouged out of the hillside. All round it there crowded trees, and an undergrowth of juniper and rhododendron grew to the forehead of the cleft.
“Look!” said Matthew Sweetland. “The scamps comed down there; an’ one slipped, I reckon. See how the soil be tored away. I lay he fell pretty heavy. ’Twas this here more[1] catched his foot an’ over he comed. Here’s feathers an’ blood where he fell.”
Minnie stood by her father-in-law and examined the marks he indicated. It was clear that some heavy body had crashed over the edge of the quarry and fallen six feet into a bed of fern beneath. While the man examined the ground, Minnie picked up a feather or two, regarded the clotted blood beneath, and wondered whether it came from a dead pheasant or a living poacher. She peeped about among the fern, then started, bent down, picked up a small object and put it into her pocket quickly. When the keeper returned she was looking listlessly at the wound on the quarry.
“The man must have fallen heavy, if ’twas a man,” she said.