“Then her growed a thought pale an’ tried to pass me.
“I went home presently; but from that hour Nelly Baker was seen no more. None ever knowed I’d been the last to speak with her; an’ none ever pitied me. But there was a rare fuss made over Oliver Honeywell. He wore black for her; an’ lived a bachelor for five year. Then he married a widow; but not till his mother died.
“An’ that’s the story I thought would interest some folks.”
The minister tapped his pipe on the hob, and knocked the ashes out. He cleared his throat and spoke. He had learned nothing that was new to him.
“It is a strange story indeed, Mr. Mundy, and I am interested to have heard it from your own lips. Rumor has not lied, for once. The tale, as you tell it, is substantially the same that has been handed down in this village for two generations. But no one knows that you were the last to see Nelly Baker. Did you ever guess what happened?”
The old man smiled, and showed his empty gums.
“No—I didn’t guess, because I knowed very well without guessing,” he said. “All the same I should have thought that you, with your mighty fine knowledge of human nature, would have guessed very quick. ’Twas I killed my brother—broke in the back of his head wi’ a pickax when he was down on one knee tying his bootlace. An’ me only fifteen year old! An’ I killed Nelly Baker—how, it don’t matter. You’ll find the dust of ’em side by side in one of them old ‘money pits’ ’pon Bellever Tor. ’Tis a place that looks due east, an’ there’s a ring of stones a hundred yards away from it. The ‘old men’ buried their dead there once, I’ve heard tell. Break down a gert flat slab o’ granite alongside a white thorn tree, an’ you’ll find what’s left of ’em in a deep hole behind. So she never comed by any property after all.”
The ancient sinner’s head fell forward, but his eyes were still open.
“Good God! After all these years! Man, man, make your peace! Confess your awful crime!” cried the clergyman.
The other answered: