“You say yourself that father was far too sharp to so be taken by surprise,” muttered the boy.
“Aye–that is so. But the facts are there, lad. I s’arched the ground over–I headed the band of scouts who found him–remember that! Nobody had been near the lick but Jonas. There wasn’t a footmark for rods around. Even an Injin couldn’t have got near enough to strike Jonas down with his gun-butt—”
“You believe that wound on his head, then, was made by no deer’s antler?” exclaimed Enoch, eagerly.
“Tut, tut! You jump too quick,” said Bolderwood, turning his face away. “That’s never well. Allus look b’fore ye leap, Nuck. My ’pinion be that your father struck his head on a stone in falling—”
“Where is there a stone here?” demanded the boy, with a speaking gesture of his disengaged hand. “I saw that deep wound in father’s skull. I never believed a buck did that.”
“And yet there was naught but the prints of the buck’s hoofs in the soil here–be sure of that. The ground was trampled all about as though the fight had been desp’rate–as indeed it must have been.”
“But that blow on the head?” reiterated Enoch.
“Ah, lad, I can’t understand that. The wound certainly was mainly like a blow from a gun-stock,” admitted Bolderwood.
“Then Simon Halpen compassed his death–I am sure of it!” cried the boy. “You well know how he hated father. Halpen would never forget the beech-sealing he got last fall. He threatened to be terribly revenged on us; and Bryce and I heard him threaten father, too, when he fought him upon the crick bank and father tossed the Yorker into the middle of the stream.”
Bolderwood chuckled. “Simon as well might tackle Ethan Allen himself as to have wrastled with Jonas,” he said.... “But we must hurry, lad. We have work–and perhaps serious work–before us this day. It may be the battle of our lives; we may l’arn to-day whether we are to be free people here in Bennington, or are to be driven out like sheep at the command of a flunkey under a royal person who lives so far across the sea that he knows naught of, nor cares naught for us.”