“Well,” he said, “it’s like this here. You’d hear what Grimsdale said about Mr. Guy Markenmore coming to this house that night before he was murdered, and being in company with two other gentlemen?”
“Of course,” responded Blick, “I heard it.”
“One of ’em,” continued Pegge, “a tall man—tall as Mr. Harborough? So Grimsdale said—from what he see of him, as they was going away?”
“Yes—I remember,” said Blick.
“Well, I’ll tell ’ee something,” Pegge went on, showing signs of rising interest in his own story. “Grimsdale ’ud tell you that I’m groom at Mrs. Tretheroe’s—we’ve a coachman and two grooms there—I’m head groom. Our mistress has five horses at present—couple of hunters, two carriage horses, and a very good cob. Now, on Monday afternoon, this here cob—’tain’t common sort of an animal, for Mrs. Tretheroe, she give a hundred and forty guineas for him only a month since—took ill—colic, or something o’ that sort—and I had to fetch the veterinary surgeon to him. The vet., he was at our place for an hour or two that evening a-doctoring of him, and he sort o’ pulled him round, but says he to our coachman and the rest of us, ‘One of you chaps,’ he says, ‘’ll have to sit up with this cob all night, and look well after him.’ So I offered to do that—t’other two is married men, and lives in the village here; me being a single man, I lives over the stables, d’ye see?”
“I see,” said Blick. “You were on the spot.”
“On the spot, so to speak,” agreed Pegge. “Well, the vet., he leaves us some medicine, and he tells me what to do, all through the night, with this here cob, and so, when it gets late, and all the rest of ’em had gone, I gets my supper in the servants’ hall, and takes a bit o’ something to eat during the night, and settles down as comfortable as I could in the saddle-room, next to the loose-box where we had this poorly cob. He went on all right, that cob did—hadn’t no trouble with he at all, and he’s right now—quite fit again. However, that’s neither here nor there, in a way of speaking—what I mention the cob for is to show you how I come to be up all that Monday night, d’ye see?”
“I understand,” said Blick. “It’s all clear, Pegge. Go ahead!”
“Well,” continued Pegge, “there’s nothing happens till about a quarter to two o’clock in the morning. I know it was that ’cause I had to keep looking at the cob every so often from the time the vet. left him, and that was one of the times. I’d just been into his loose-box, and come out when I remembered that I’d no tobacco left in my pouch. But I had plenty in a tin in my bedroom, so I went off to fetch it. Now then, you must understand that our stabling at the Dower House is separated from the drive by a high hedge of macrocarpus trees—shrubbery, d’ye see? I was going along this hedge side, between it and the coach-house wall, on my way to the stairs that leads up to my bedroom, when I hear somebody coming down the drive, t’other side the hedge—soft, like. So I stops, dead——”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Blick. “What were you walking on, yourself, Pegge? What sort of a pavement, or path?”