"Good fortune such as this (the timely burial of Elder Rae, that is) we could not always depend upon. But as far as possible, of course, we arranged our business transactions so that they fell due on the day of a funeral, either at Over Breckonton or Breckonside. Bewick was of no use to us—the graveyard there having the fatal fault of being placed under the windows of the manse, and the minister being a bachelor, who never cared whether he went to bed at all or not, keeping his light burning till three of the morning. Such men have no right to be ministers. Still, for the time being, the other two parishes served us very well.
"I saw, however, that a change was becoming necessary, indeed imperative. Also, thanks to a certain drover of the name of Lang Hutchins, I had the money. It was most providential (I shall always so regard it) that at this very time the place and policies of Deep Moat Grange came into the market.
"Lang Hutchins was a pure windfall—a catch of Jeremy's. I had nothing to do with that. One night Jeremy walked into the weaving-room with a great leathern pocket-book.
"'Where did you get that?' I asked. I was, I remember, at the loom, and the pattern being an interesting one, the time had passed without my regarding its flight. It was, as a matter of fact, past one of the morning.
"'Lang Hutchins, the Bewick drover, gied it to me,' said Jeremy Orrin, 'and as there were nae funerals in Breckonside, and that minister man at Bewick willna put his candle oot, I had e'en to make Lang Hutchins up a bonnie bed in the gairden at the Grange o' the Moat!'
"I rose instantly to my feet. This was indeed terrible. I had a vision (which I have often seen in reality since) of Jeremy scratching the earth with his fingers, and creeping about on the black soil like some unclean beast, leaving marks easy to be read by the first passer-by. We should be discovered. Jeremy would be tracked, and I saw in appalling perspective two gibbets, and on one the murderer, and on the other his master—the same Miser Hobby who had thought to make a lady of his daughter; now Howard Stennis, Esquire—both raised to the dignity of the hempen cravat.
"For a moment I did not know what to do—yes, even I, to whom plans occur like oaths to a bad, foul-mouthed, swearing man such as Lang Hutchins, one who had defied his Maker the very day his soul, was required of him.
"'Buried in the garden at Deep Moat Grange!' I repeated to myself. 'The place out of habitation, a prey to every poacher, the gardens and orchards overrun by vagrant boys!' Ah—even in that word it had come to me!
"Deep Moat Grange was for sale! But then I had not enough money to buy it, and I could not face the raising of a mortgage—the possible scrutinies! At that moment Jeremy Orrin tossed carelessly at me a long, many-caped overcoat, such as long-distance coachmen used to wear in the days when twice a day the 'Dash' and the 'Flying Express' passed Breckonside, and I was a boy in knee breeches and a blue bonnet. I could feel that the coat was well padded though not heavy. And there in the weaving-room of the little cottage, I drew out of the lining hundreds and hundreds of packets of five-pound notes, all English, and mostly long in use, like those which pass from hand to hand among drovers. I could see that no one of them had recently been in a bank. There would, therefore, be no awkward record of the numbers. Moreover, Lang Hutchins had come north suddenly (so Jeremy told me) after quite a year of running the southern markets.
"It was as safe as could be—all but the garden plot at Deep Moat Grange, where in one particular oblong the earth had been raked with the split and blackened nails of Jeremy's fingers.