horrible and satisfied leer.
‘I don’t know how to find my way into the wood,’ said Laura, halting upon its outskirts. ‘If it were daylight, we could skirt it and see the three barrows beyond, but— ’
‘Three barrows and three dead men,’ said O’Hara, with Irish omniscience.
‘Then here we stay,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘We don’t need to go in among the trees.’
The night was chilly, and the woods were wet. The party remained upon the outskirts, where Laura remembered fallen tree-trunks. They took these for seats, and waited in patient silence broken only by the striking of a match as the young men lit their pipes.
Mrs. Bradley, whose amiable custom it was to devote her sweets to her young friends, had come with sundry pieces of chocolate. These, and some slices of bread, sustained the party, and a nip all round from her flask helped to keep out the chills and the damp.
At two in the morning, by Laura’s luminous watch, a light appeared among the trees on the edge of the wood, and there was the sound of voices. At a nudge from Mrs. Bradley, Gascoigne got to his feet, switched on his torch, and, loudly swearing, began to grope his way towards the direction from which the voices came.
‘Me, too?’ muttered O’Hara, under cover of his cousin’s noisy progress.
‘No, child. Listen. We must find out first whether these arc the right people.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He relaxed again and listened. Gascoigne had waylaid the newcomers.
‘That’s the man!’ murmured O’Hara, recognizing the voice of the older Battle.
‘Then up and at him!’ Mrs. Bradley commanded. ‘Never mind the rules— ’
‘Just knock ’em cold,’ said Laura, going into battle with her usual single-minded enthusiasm.
‘All three of ’em!’ yelled Gascoigne, from the van of the engagement. The enemy, taken entirely by surprise and outnumbered six to one (for a posse of policemen, to Laura’s fury, got up suddenly like partridges from the ground) formed an easy prey. They were Cassius and the two Battles. Cassius’ son, the lubberly Ivor Sisyphus, was found next morning hiding in the wood.
‘And now,’ said the voice of Laura’s fiance, David Gavin, who had accompanied the police from Welsea, where he had expected to find Laura that evening, ‘what’s all this about?’
‘If only we could go to bed together,’ said Laura rapturously, from her seat on Mr. Cassius-Concaverty’s head, ‘I’d have plenty of time to tell you.’
‘I doubt it,’ said her swain, ‘but we could try.’
An unpleasant task awaited O’Hara next day. Mrs. Bradley had concluded that the head and hands, which had been dug up from the floor of the cave with the bodies of Bulstrode and the drowned couple, must belong to the man who had misdirected O’Hara (mistaking him for Firman) on the day of the Club hare and hounds.
O’Hara’s confirmation of her theory clinched the case against the Battles and Cassius.
‘I’m afraid of the Druids,’ said Laura. ‘I shall never go near them again.’ The young men were not of this opinion.
‘It’s remarkably interesting, you know,’ said O’Hara. ‘They’re called the Dancing Druids, and one of them
It was left to the Chief Constable, however, to say the last word about dancing. It was addressed, moreover, to Mrs. Bradley.
‘You’ve got something—I don’t know what to call it, you know, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘But you always make me think of that fellow—Dante, was it?—“
‘Don’t make love to her in front of my face,’ said his wife.
—«»—«»—«»—
1. I am indebted, for this and much other fascinating information, to
2. Gilbert Keith Chesterton—
3. This boy afterwards became Assistant Keeper in the Department of Archaeology in the University Museum at Padmancaster, and wrote a standard work on Bronze Age Survivals in Britain.
[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[A 3S Release— v1, html]
[October 22, 2006]
