“That’s right, but I was too early. Now, sergeant, I asked you to come out here for rather an unusual purpose: in fact, so that we might dig a hole. Here is a spade and we’ll go and begin at once.”
The sergeant looked as if he wondered whether French hadn’t gone off his head, but he controlled his feelings and with his satellite followed the other’s lead.
“I want you,” went on French when they had reached the site of his discovery, “to see just why I wish to dig this hole at this place,” and he showed him the traces of the yellow clay and the cut sods. “You see, some one has buried something here, and I want to find out what it is.”
Kent in a non-committal silence seized the spade and began digging. The constable then tried his hand, and when he had had enough, French relieved him. So they took it in turns while the hole deepened and the heap of soil beside it grew.
Suddenly the spade encountered something soft and yielding which yet resisted its pressure. Kent, who was using it, stopped digging and began to clear away the surrounding soil, while the others watched, French breathlessly, the constable with the bovine impassiveness which he had exhibited throughout.
“It’s a blanket, this is,” the sergeant announced presently. “Something rolled up in a blanket.”
“Go on,” said French. “Open it up.”
Kent resumed his digging. For some minutes he worked, and then he straightened himself and looked at French wonderingly.
“Lord save us!” he exclaimed in awed tones. “It’s uncommon like a human corpse.”
“Nonsense!” French answered sharply. “It couldn’t be anything of the kind. Get on and open it and then you’ll know.”