“Make yourself easy, my friend!” he said. “I know no more than you do, I think. I should be glad to know a lot more.”
“But you’m what I do say, hain’t you, mister?” suggested Bob Gravus. “I hear you was, anyway.”
“Well, you can take it I am,” admitted Blick. “But I can’t see through a brick wall, any more than you can!”
“’Tis a true saying, that!” remarked one of the company, solemnly. “Faith, yes, the powers of mortal man be terrible limited, as you med say. Things there is as man that is born of a woman can do, and things there is as he cannot do. And there ain’t never been a man so fur as I knows on us could see through a brick wall. A true remark!”
“Well,” said another, “it be a main powerful mystery who done it, and as difficult a thing to find out as I reckon it ’ud be to lift Selcaster Cathedral wi’ a jack-screw. And you can’t go for to walk around the neighbourhood a-saying to one and then to another ‘Was it you as done this terrible wicked deed’—can’t, nohow! ’Cause why? They’d all say they didn’t!”
There was a murmur of general approval at this piece of wisdom. But a dark-faced man who sat in a corner and who had listened in silence up to that point, suddenly lifted his pot of ale, drank from it, and set it down again with an emphatic bang.
“Tell ’ee all what I do think, and no two ways about it!” he exclaimed. “This here shooting o’ Master Guy Markenmore what you’re all talking so free about and don’t get no forrarder—I do think as how Mistress Braxfield, up to Woodland Cottage, did shoot he! That’s what I do say. Mistress Braxfield, as kept this house once—she done it!” Blick turned sharply from the bar; the other men turned towards the speaker; a dead silence fell over the room, broken at last by a solemn voice.
“You’m best to mind what you’re a-saying of, Bill Carver!” it said. “There be law for them as slanders folk—you’ll be took to ’sizes! Beside, Master Guy, he be shooted with a revolver. Mistress Braxfield ain’t got no revolvers, and couldn’t shoot one if she had!”
“Ain’t she?” exclaimed Bill Carver, derisive and contemptuous. “Then I tells ’ee that she have! Many’s the time I seen her a-shooting with that, early of a morning when I bin about them downs. I seen her shoot a score o’ times at foxes what comes arter her chickens. And when you says who shot Master Guy Markenmore, I says Mistress Braxfield did shoot he! That’s what I say—and don’t care who hears me say it! Ain’t I free to say what I do think?—’tis a free country!”