"I'll not tell, but—"
Bates took no heed. "My aunt," he began, "had money laid by; she had ten English sovereigns she liked to keep by her—women often do. There was no one but me and Sissy knew where it was; and she took them with her. By that I know she was making for the railway, and—" His voice grew unsteady as he brought his hand down; there was a look of far-off vision in his eyes, as though he saw the thing of which he spoke. "Ay, she's lying now somewhere on the hills, where she would be beaten down by the snow before she reached a road."
Trenholme was thinking of the sadness of it all, forgetting to wonder even why he had been told not to repeat this last, when he found Bates was regarding his silence with angry suspicion.
"It wasn't stealing," he said irritably; "she knew she might have them if she wanted." It was as though he were giving a shuffling excuse for some fault of his own and felt its weakness.
The young man, taken by surprise, said mechanically, "Would Miss Bates have given them to her?" He had fallen into the habit of referring to the childish old woman with, all due form, for he saw Bates liked it.
"Hoots! What are you saying, man? Would ye have had the lassie leave the burden on my mind that she'd gone out of her father's house penniless? 'Twas the one kindness she did me to take the gold."
CHAPTER VI.
One evening Alec Trenholme sat down to write to his brother. Bates had urged him to write, and, after a due interval, of his own accord he wrote. The urging and the writing had a certain relation of cause and effect, but the writer did not think so. Also, the letter he wrote was very different from the document of penitence and recantation that Bates had advised, and now supposed him to be writing.
He gave a brief account of what he had done before he accepted the post of station-master at Turrifs Station, and then,
"I liked it well enough," he wrote, "until one night a queer thing happened. As evening came on, a man drove up bringing a coffin to be sent by train to the next village for burial. When I was left alone with the thing, the man inside got up—he really did, I saw him. I shut him in and ran to fetch the carter, but couldn't catch him. When I came back, the man had got out and ran into the wood. They had lined the box with a white bed-quilt, and we found that some miles away in the bush the next day, but we never found the man; and the queer thing is that there were two men and a girl who seem to have been quite certain he was dead. One of them, a very intelligent fellow that I am staying with now, thinks the carter must have played some trick on the way; but I hardly believe that myself, from the way the carter acted. I think he spoke the truth; he said he had been alone on the road all day, and had been scared out of his wits by hearing the man turn in the coffin. He seemed well frightened, too. Of course, if this is true, the man could not really have been dead; but I'm not trying to give an explanation; I'm just telling you what occurred. Well, things went on quietly enough for another month, and on the last night of the old year the place was snowed up—tracks, roads, everything—and at midnight an old man came about who answered to the description I had of the dead man, clothes and all, for it seems they were burying him in his clothes. He was rather deaf, and blind I think, though I'm not sure, and he seemed to be wandering in his mind somehow; but he was a fine, powerful fellow—reminded me a little of father—and the pathetic thing about it was that he had got the idea into his head—"