or a dozen feet deep, and steadily settling deeper. Grass clawed at the rims of it, trying to hold fast The slopes of clay which descended into it were furrowed and dried and cracked into lozenges by the dry season, and down in the bottom a small abrupt subsidence within the large and slow one had exposed a curved surface of brickwork pitted with darker holes. Round it the young trees leaned, fearfully and inquisitively peering in, and Dominic with the torch in his hand was only one more strange young staring tree, curious and afraid.
“Just another old shaft!” said Pussy, recovering her aplomb.
“Yes. I didn’t know about this one, did you? But there are dozens all over the place.”
“ ’Tisn’t a nice sort of place, is it?” said Pussy, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “Look at those holes down there! I bet you there are rats!”
“I bet there are! It’s all right, though. I thought for a minute it was an open shaft, didn’t you?”
They had forgotten Sandy and the fat girl, until a sudden howl and hubbub broke out on the other side of the fence, rustle of stealthy footsteps first, then giggles, then a shriek of triumph and discovery, and crashing of running bodies among the bushes. “It’s Pat and Nancy—I heard you! Come on, Pat, you devil—show!” And a pencilly beam of light, wavering and striped among the branches as the detected pair switched on, and the thunder and protest of pursuit, sibilant slithering of willows, hard obstreperous clawing of gorse, dangerously near.
“Duck!” hissed Dominic, clamping a hand over the torch until she could wrestle the button back. “Quick, they’re coming this way!” She struggled, and the thread of sheathed light dwindled away into the warm dark of his palm. The hunters, returning in triumph, quested along the fence, traced by their steps back and forth, back and forth, whispering.
“Someone else up here! Sure of it! Who? Can’t be! Can’t hear a thing! But there
“It’s trespassing. And there might be traps!”
“Rot, it’s against the law.”
The pale creaked. Danger prickled at Pussy’s spine, at Dominic’s. Only one way to go for cover. Softly, softly, over the rim of the slope, his hand on her wrist, down the smooth-rough, needle-glazed, heat-ridged sides of the funnel, down into the pit, down among the cobwebs, down where the rats go. They slid down inch by inch on their bellies, feeling the way gingerly with outstretched toes, and holding by the tufts of coarse grass which had such a different texture in the dark.
Right down into the uncomfortable oubliette at the bottom, by the invisible shatterings of the arched brickwork and the black holes which Pussy preferred not to remember. The darkness here had a smell, dry, musty, faintly rotten. It made their nostrils curl with repulsion and yet quiver with curiosity—like the vaults of the Castle of Otranto, perhaps, or the family tomb of the Baskervilles. They huddled together in it and froze into stillness, until the stealthy crunching of feet in the pine-silt had withdrawn again, afraid to venture so far beyond the pales.
“How if they fall in?” breathed Pussy in Dominic’s ear, tremulous with giggles.
“Can’t fall far—and we’ll be under. Shut up!”
But the night, settling lower in its pillows, breathing long and gently toward sleep, brought no more echoes of pursuit down to them; and in a few minutes they relaxed, and sorted out their tangled legs from among the dirty trailers of bramble and spears of discouraged grass.
“They’ve gone!”
“I think! But don’t shout too soon. Give them a minute or two more.”
“Be damned!” said Pussy elegantly. “I want to get out of here.” She rumbled at the torch again, and swore because as usual it refused to light until she had almost broken her nail on it.
“Why, what’s the matter with it here? Been in a lot worse places.” Dominic stretched and heaved himself upright by the edges of brickwork, and fragments came away in his fingers and all but tumbled him down again. He groped, and encountered dankness, the caving softness of earth hidden from the sun, cool, dirty, unpleasing opening of one of the holes. Strange how cold! Touch the clay above in the open mounds, and it warmed you even after dusk, but this involuntary contact added to the shock of its recession the shock of its tomblike, dead chill, striking up his wrist, making the skin of his arm creep like running spiders. He was glad that Pussy was busy stamping on his little vaunt, as usual, so that she failed to hear his minute gasp of disgust.
“Oh, yes! Old Tubby’s study this morning, for instance— I heard all about it!”
Half his mind gathered itself to retort, but only half, and that uneasily. How could she have heard all about it? Nobody knew all about it except the headmaster and Dominic himself, and he was jolly sure neither of these two had told her anything. And anyhow, the old boy had been in quite a good mood, and nothing had resulted except a lecture and a few footling lines, which he hadn’t yet done. Oh, hell! Silly old-maid things, lines! The hole went back and back; he stretched his arm delicately, and couldn’t feel any end to it. Filthy the cold earth felt in there. And there was something, his fingertips found it, something suddenly soft, with a horrid, doughy solidity inside it, soft, clinging to his fingers, like fur, perhaps, or feathers. He drew his hand back, and the soft bulk followed it a little, shifting uneasily among the loosened soil. Not alive, not a rat. It just rolled after the recoil of his hand because he had disturbed it, but it was small and dead. Rabbit? But not quite that feel. Spines in the softness, longer here. Feathers— a tapering tail.
“Something in here,” he said, drawing his hand out; and his voice had the small awareness which could stop Pussy in mid-scramble, wherever they happened to be at the time, and make her turn the beam of the suddenly compliant torch upon his face. He was a little streaked and dusty, but not so bad, on the whole; it took a second and longer look to discover how far his mind had sprung from hide-and-seek. He sniffed at his own hand, and wrinkled his nose with shock. A clinging odor of rottenness prodded him in the pit of his vulnerable stomach, but his inquisitiveness rose above that. “Wait a minute! Shine the light this way again. There
He was groping again, more deliberately this time, with his eyes screwed up, as if that would prevent his nose from working since he had no free hand with which to hold it, and his teeth tight clenched, as if through their grip was produced the power which propelled him.
Pussy said, sitting firmly halfway up the slope, where she had turned to stare at him: “Don’t be so daft! What would a bird be doing down a hole like that?”
“Daft yourself! He’s just lying there, dead, because someone put him there, that’s what. And why did somebody put him there? Why, because he didn’t want to be caught carrying him— Wait a minute, I can’t— There
