Had he been anything like my size I should not have gone, for his appearance was very far from assuring, but, as he was a small man, I felt comparatively safe. We walked side by side over the grass, crossed a gleaming, white path, and steering in a slightly northerly direction—I could tell that much by the stars—abruptly halted in front of a shallow pit, on the other side of which was a big bush.
“It’s there,” he said, pointing at the pit. “I’ve tried to sleep there twice, and each time I’ve been woken up by hearing something heavy fall close to my head. It seems to come from the bush. It’s the bush that skeers me,” he added, “and though I don’t mind passing it in the day-time, nothing on earth will persuade me to look behind it after dark.”
“Not even sixpence,” I said, fingering that coin in my waistcoat pocket.
“Go on,” he said, “you haven’t sixpence, otherwise you’d not be here. You’re joking. If anyone really did offer me sixpence now to do it, well, I don’t say but what I mightn’t try.”
He spoke so hungrily and looked so famished that I decided to part with it, though sixpence to me just then had a particularly real value. I showed it him. “Look behind that tree,” I said, “and I’ll give it you.”
He set off at once. “No,” I called out, “that won’t do; you must go through the pit.” He proceeded to obey, and was in the middle of the hollow, when I distinctly heard something very heavy strike the ground apparently close to him. I ran round the bush, just in time to see what I thought was a black shadow shoot across the ground and disappear in a neighbouring cluster of trees. When I returned, the tramp was still in the pit, but I could see nothing there to account for the noise.
“Well,” he said. “Did you hear it?”
“I heard something,” I replied, “and there’s your sixpence.”
I often went to Wimbledon Common afterwards, but never again saw the tramp, nor found the hollow.