Neale glanced at Betty and shook his head.
"There you are, you see!" he muttered. "They all hang to the notion that Hollis did meet Horbury! Mr. Horbury may have been alone, after all, you know," he went on, turning to Creasy. "There's no proof that the other gentleman was with him."
"Aye, well—I'm going on what these paper accounts say," answered Creasy. "They all take it for granted that those two were together. Well, about these old shaftings, mister—I did notice something very early this morning that I thought might be looked into."
"What is it?" asked Neale. "Don't let's lose any chance of finding anything out, however small it may be."
The tinker finished mending a kettle and set it aside amongst other renovated articles. He lifted the pan of solder off the fire, set it aside, too, and got up.
"Come this way, then," he said. "I was going in to Scarnham this noon to tell Mr Polke about it, but as long as you're here——"
He led the way through the thick gorse and heather until he came to a narrow track which wound across the moor in the direction of the town. There he paused, pointing towards Ellersdeane on the one hand, towards Scarnham on the other.
"You see this track, mister?" he said. "You'll notice that it goes to Ellersdeane village that way, and to Scarnham this. Of course, you can't see it all the way in either direction, but you can take my word for it—it does. It comes out at Ellersdeane by the duck-pond, at Scarnham by the bridge at the foot of Cornmarket. People who know it would follow it if they wanted a short cut across the moor from the town to the village—or the opposite, as you might say. Now then, look here—a bit this way."
He preceded them along the narrow track until, on an open space in the moorland, they came to one of the old lead-mine shafts, the mouth of which had been fenced in by a roughly built wall of stone gathered from its immediate surroundings. In this wall, extending from its parapet to the ground, was a wide gap: the stones which had been displaced to make it had disappeared into the cavernous opening.
"Now then!" said the tinker, turning on his companions with the inquiring look of a man who advances a theory which may or may not be accepted as reasonable, "you see that? What I'd like to know is—is that a recently made gap? It's difficult to tell. If this bit of a stone fence had been built with mortar, one could have told. But it's never had mortar or lime in it!—it's just rough masonry, as you see—stones picked up off the moor, like all these fences round the old shafts. But—there's the gap right enough! Do you know what I'm thinking?"