Fallen Into the Pit

The dusk came, and they did not even notice it until they were straining their eyes upon the ground. Then the torches came out, and the dark came, and as their eyes were bent assiduously upon the circles of light upon the trampled ground, it quite startled them to look up suddenly and see that the sky had stars already, and was deeply blue between the clusters of them, fully dark. The gradual brightening of the discs of gold, the gradual darkening of the walls of dark, had passed unnoticed.

“It must be getting late,” said Pussy dubiously.

“Oh, rot, can’t be!” He had not his watch on him, but he was quite confident, because it seemed to him that he had been there no time at all. “It gets dark very quickly, once it starts. But it can’t be past nine o’clock yet.”

“Seems as if it’s hopeless, though,” said Pussy, staring at the well. They were disheveled, tired and unbelievably dirty. Clay even in Dom’s hair, where he had come down full-length once, and slid downhill on his back. Smears of ocher down his face. She had an uneasy feeling that she did not look very much better herself. Now that she came to look at him, the effect was awe-inspiring. She said: “Wait till your mother sees you! My word, isn’t there going to be a row!”

“My mother will listen to me,” said Dominic firmly, “she always lets people explain. If you’re scared, go on home, or anyhow, go on up to the level and wait for me. I’m not afraid of my mother.”

“Well, anyhow, we’ve looked everywhere, and it seems a dead end.”

“I know,” he said, dismally smearing a clay-stiffened eheek. He had not expected much, but he did not admit that, there was no point in making Pussy feel worse than she did already. “And yet if we quit now, there won’t be any chance of finding anything after. We’ve trampled the whole place up, and after a few more rainstorms it’ll be hopeless. But I suppose it was a thin chance—after so long. If we couldn’t find a weapon or any sign of one that first time, we couldn’t very well expect to find it now.” He stared at the back of the well, where the fierce, quiet jet of the outfall poured into a little pebbly hollow, and ran away downhill through boulders and small stones to join the stream. “You know, I always thought—”

“Thought what?” asked Pussy, following his stare and the strong beam of the torch.

“Well, if I’d hit somebody over the head with a club, or whatever it was, close here by the well, I shouldn’t throw it away and leave it to be found. And of course he didn’t, either, or we should have found it. But if—if there was any blood, or anything, I shouldn’t want to carry it away like that, either. They said it was something thin, like a walking-stick or a crop, so if it was you could easily walk away carrying it, even if you met a dozen people on your way home, if it was just clean and normal. But you have to be careful about getting even the smallest drop of blood on your clothes, because they can tell even months after what group it is, and everything.”

“Plenty of water down there,” said Pussy, shivering, “where he put the body. He could wash it.”

“Yes, but that’s the stream, and it’s ocher water; I should think if there were any grooves, or if there was a plaited thong, like in some crops, or anywhere that dirt could lodge, that fearful yellow stuff might get left behind. Enough to be traced, they don’t need much. But here,” he said, jerking his solemn head at the muscular arm of the outflow, and gnawing at his knuckles forgetful of their coating of clay, “here’s clean water, and with a kick on it that ought to wash anything off anything if you just stood it in it firmly for a few minutes. Very nearly wash the paint off, too. Only, of course, it wasn’t quite so strong as this then. But it was pretty hefty, all the same. Remember, we were mucking about with it that next night, throwing jets around, and it was all you could do to keep your hand still in it.”

Pussy drew a little nearer to him at the stirring of that memory, steadying herself by his arm. “Yes, that’s right! I remember, just before you found him—”

“If I’d had to get a stick cleaned up after a job like that,” said Dominic, “I should have wedged it in among the stones there so that it stood in the outflow. I should think if you left it there just while you dragged the body down and put it in the stream, and then came back for it and walked right on into the village, or wherever you were going, there wouldn’t be even a hair or a speck left on it to show. Anyhow, that’s what I should have done. Like anybody who had a drop of blood on his hands here would just run there and wash them. It stands to sense.”

She agreed, with a shiver, that it seemed reasonable. Dominic climbed up the slope and pulled a stick out of the lush foot of the hedge, and scrambled with it up into the stony fringes of the outflow. “Like that!” He planted it upright, digging the point deep between the stones and into the soft underneath of the bed, and it stood held and balanced in the direct jet of the water, which gripped it solidly as in ice. “You see? It couldn’t be simpler.”

The spray from the tiny basin spattered him, and, shifting a precarious foothold, he stepped backward to one unluckily more precarious still. A rounded, reddish stone rocked under his foot, and slid from its place, bringing down in one wet vociferous fall Dominic and a large section of the stony bank together. He yelled, clawing at the boulders, and tumbled heavily on one hip and shoulder into the descending stream below the outfall. His hands felt for a firm hold among the stones under the water, to brace himself clear of it and get to his feet again; and sharp under his right palm, deep between the disturbed pebbles, something stung him with a sharp, metallic impact, denting but not breaking the skin.

Pussy, slithering along to help him out, sensed his instant excitement in his sudden quietness. She had reached for his arm, but he was grubbing instead in the bed of the brook, bringing up some small muddy thing which was certainly not the weapon with which anyone had been killed; and until he had it washed clean of encrustations of silt he was not even interested in getting out of the water. He scrambled backwards to his feet, and dipped the thing, and rubbed it on his handkerchief, which in any case was already soaking wet and smeared with clay.

“What have you got?” asked Pussy, craning to peer over his shoulder with the torch.

“I don’t know. We’ll have a look at it in a minute, when you can see it for muck—but it’s something queer to find in a brook. Look, it’s beginning to shine. I believe it’s silver.”

“Tin, more likely,” said Pussy scornfully.

“No, tin would have rusted away in no time, but this was so covered in mud it must have been there some time, and you can see it’s only sort of dulled. If one edge hadn’t stuck in me I wouldn’t have known there was anything there at all.”

He climbed out of his stony bath, shivering a little in the chill night air, but too intent on his find to pay much attention to his own state. It was Pussy who observed the shiver.

“Dom, you’re terribly wet. You’ll catch cold if we don’t get home double-quick.”

“Yes, all right, we’ll go in a minute. But look—now look!”