Murder never occurred to the child; he only recognized the fact that the man he had seen walking about the day before had suddenly lost his head, and the horror of this fact, suddenly borne in on him, was greater than he could well bear.
He ran he knew not whither, but presently he found himself sitting under a wall shivering and shaking and very sick.
Then he went home, but he did not tell what he had seen.
He sat in a corner of his father’s cottage looking “waugh.” He would take no tea, and he went to bed mum. But no sooner was he undressed and between the sheets than suddenly, as if touched off, he began to bellow.
Then it all came out helter-skelter, and the horrified cottagers listened to him as he told his gruesome tale.
There is scarcely a farm girl in Cumberland who has not a bicycle of her own, and before the tale was well told Bob Lewthwaite’s eldest sister had started to fetch the constable from Langwathby.
When he arrived, and when lamps were lit, the whole village, headed by the policeman, made for Skirle Cottage.
The constable alone entered.
On the floor lay the body of Klein, headless and fearful to behold. It was dressed in the well-known grey suit, but the clothes, for some mysterious reason, were slashed, as if with a knife. The coat was open and the waistcoat, but there were no wounds on the trunk that the constable could see.
No knife or weapon of any sort was to be seen.