“I have known a person rendered an idiot for life with a less fright than this,” said old Duff, turning round to speak. “It was the following her that did the mischief.”
Nothing could be done that night as to investigation; but with the morning the Squire entered upon it in hot anger. “Couldn’t the fool have been contented with what he’d already done, without going over the stile after her? If I spend a fifty-pound note, I’ll unearth him. It looks to me uncommonly like a trick you two boys would play,” he added, turning sharply upon me and Tod.
And the suspicion made us all the more eager to find out the real fox. But not a clue could we discover. Nobody had known of the proposed expedition except Goody Picker; and she, as everybody testified, was true to the backbone. As the day went on, and nothing came of it, Tod had one of his stamping fits.
“If one could find out whether it was man or woman! If one could divine how they got at the knowledge!” stamped Tod. “The pater does not look sure about us yet.”
“I wonder if it could have been Roger Monk?” I said, speaking out a thought that had been dimly creeping up in my mind by starts all day.
“Roger Monk!” repeated Tod, “why pitch upon him?”
“Only that it’s just possible he might have got it out of Goody Picker.”
Away went Tod, in his straightforward fashion, to look for Roger Monk. He was in the hot-house, doing something to his plants.
“Monk, did you play that trick last night?”