Fallen Into the Pit

are two of ’em! What d’you know? A brace!”

“Pheasants!” said Pussy, leaping to catch up with him, and came slithering to his side again, a minor avalanche of clay dust and pine-rubbish accompanying her.

They were not, when he drew them out into the light of the torch, immediately recognizable as anything except a draggled and odorous mess, fouled with cobwebs and earth. He held them away from him, swiveling on his heels to get to windward, even where there was no apparent wind; and his stomach kicked again, more vigorously, but he would not pay attention to it. A nasty, mangled mess, with broken feathers, and soiled down. Rat-gnawed, too, but the wobbling light failed to show Pussy the traces. Dominic’s spine crawled, but the charm was already working, his tightening wits had their noses to the ground. He reared his face, taking a blind line across country, clean over Pussy’s stooped, inquisitive head. The fence only a few yards away, the hole in the fence, the tongue of waste land, the clay bowl under the outflow of Webster’s well. He himself had said, only ten minutes ago: “I never thought it was quite so near.” And how long did it take for birds to get—like these were? In a hole in the earth like this, with rats for company, would—he calculated with lips moving rapidly, tantalizing Pussy unreasonably—would ten, eleven days produce this stage of unpleasantness? He thought it might. He shifted the draggled corpses uneasily, shaking his fingers as if he could get the unclean feeling off them that way. Must tell Dad, as soon as possible. It might not be anything, but then it might, and how was he to be sure? And he hadn’t even been looking for them, they were honestly accidental. Except that he would certainly be told, for Pete’s sake keep away from that place!

“Well, some poacher got disturbed,” said Pussy easily, “and thought it best not to be caught with the goods on him, so he dumped them in here. That’s simple enough. If he used this ground he’d know all about the holes already. Maybe he’s hidden things there before. Anyhow, what’s the song and dance about? Ugh! Put them back, and let’s get out of here. They’re horrid!”

“Well, but,” said Dominic, leaning into the thread of wind which circled the funnel of the pit, and surveying his finds out of the wary corners of large eyes, “well, but if a poacher just put them there because he thought he was going to meet somebody who could get him into trouble—maybe the owner, or the keeper—well, he put them away pretty carefully so they’d stay hidden until he could come and collect them, didn’t he? He wouldn’t want to waste his trouble.”

This she allowed to be common sense, jutting her underlip thoughtfully. They had forgotten the very existence of Sandy and his partner by this time.

“Well, then, why didn’t he collect them afterwards? Look, you can see for yourself, they’ve been there days and days. He must have meant to go back for them when the coast was clear. Why hasn’t he been?”

“I don’t know. There could be any amount of reasons. He may have been ill ever since, or something.”

“Or dead!” said Dominic.

The minute the idea and the word were out of him the darkness seemed a shade darker about them, and the malodorous carrion dangling from his reluctant hand a degree more foul. Dead birds couldn’t hurt anyone, but they could suggest other deaths, and bring the night leaning heavily over the pit-shaft in the wood, leaning down upon two suddenly shivering young creatures who observed with quite unusual unanimity the desirability of getting to some cleaner, brighter place with all haste.

“Outside,” said Pussy uneasily, as if they had been shut in, “we could see them better. It won’t be quite dark yet”

“We don’t want the others to know,” said Dominic, suddenly recalling the abandoned game. “We’ll go the other way, down the little quarry. They’ll soon give us up and go home. Or you could go and tell them I—tell them my mother wanted me, or something—while I go straight home with these.”

Pussy turned at the rim of the pit to give him a hand, because he had only one free for use. She took him by the upper arm in a grip lean and hard as a boy’s, and braced back, hoisted his weight over the edge. Waves of nauseating, faint rottenness came off the drooping bodies. She had no real wish to see them, by this or any light; she reached the open and still kept going, only drawing in a little to be just ahead of Dominic’s other shoulder.

“Oh, they’ll go home, they’ll be all right. I’m coming with you.” As they crawled through the swinging pale she asked: “Do you really think they were that German’s pheasants? Dominic, really do you?”

“Yes, really I do. Well, look down there the way we came, it’s only a few minutes to the path by the well, to the—to where he was. And unless it was someone who was dead, wouldn’t he go back for his birds? Some time before a whole week there must be a chance. After he hid them so carefully, too, because they weren’t just dropped in the bushes, he wasn’t in as big a hurry as all that. He just wanted them out of his pockets, because there was someone he heard in the woods, and he wanted to be able to pop through the fence and march off down by the well quite jauntily, nothing on him even if it was the keeper, and if he got awkward.”

“But we don’t know that Helmut had been poaching,” she objected.

“Well, we know he was as near as that to the preserves. And don’t you remember, the lining of his tunic was slit across here, to make an extra-large pocket inside. Why should he want a pocket like that, unless it was to put birds or rabbits in? And where we found him—well, it’s so near.”

They skirted the high hedge, and took the right-hand path down into the small overgrown quarry, instead of bearing left toward the all-significant well. What was left of the light seemed warm and kind and even bright upon them, greenish, bluish, with leaves, with sky, and the soft distant glimmering of stars almost invisible in the milky blue. Not even a hint of frost now, only the cool regretful afterbreath of summer, mild and quiet, ominous with foreshadowings, sweet with memories. Clamor of voices from the slackening game they had left came after them with infinite remoteness.

“He put them there until the coast was clear,” said Pussy, hushed of voice, “and he went slipping back on to the lawful path, bold as brass. What harm am I doing? Because he heard someone coming in the wood, you think? It might have been the keeper? Or it might have been anyone, almost—”

“Yes. But by the well, going along looking all innocent, as you said, he met someone. And that was the person who killed him. So he never had the chance to go back for them.”

Once out of the closed, musty, smothering darkness, where panic lay so near and came so lightly, they could discuss the thing calmly enough, and even step back from it to regard its more inconvenient personal implications. As, for instance, the unfortunate location of the pit where the discovery had been made.

“Of course,” said Pussy, “the very first thing he’ll ask you will be where did you find them? And you’ll have to admit we were trespassing.”

“He won’t have to ask me,” said Dominic, on his dignity. “It’ll be the very first thing I shall tell him.”