This meeting on the stairs took place by accident one morning—Sibbold was going to pass, but Arthur put his hand on his shoulder, “I saw you do it,” he said. He had just entered the rick yard when the shot was fired. He had held his peace, but his mind could not rest. “I cannot stay here,” he said, “I am going. I shall never see you again.”
Old Sibbold stood like a stone; but presently put his hand in his pocket and held out his purse.
“No,” said Arthur; “not a penny of that, it would be blood money.”
He went, and evil report went after him. Perhaps it was James who fanned the flame, but for years afterwards it was always believed that Arthur had shot the basket-maker. Only the Swamp people combated the notion. Arthur was one of them, and understood their language—it was impossible. Not to have to return to these times, it will be, perhaps, best to at once finish with old Sibbold; though the event did not really happen till some time after Arthur’s departure.
Sibbold went to a fair at some twenty miles distance—a yearly custom of his; and returning home in the evening, he was met by highwaymen, it is supposed, and refusing to give up his money bag, was shot. At all events his horse came home riderless, and the body of the old man was found on the heath divested of every article of value. Suspicion at once fell on his known enemies, the Swamp people. Their cottages were searched and nothing found. Their men were interrogated, but had all been either at home or in another direction. Calm reason put down Sibbold’s death to misadventure with highwaymen, common enough in those times; but there were those who always held that it was done in revenge, as it was believed that the gypsies retained the old vendetta creed.
As Arthur did not return, James took possession, and went on as usual; but he did not disturb the Swamp settlement. He avoided them, and they avoided him.
When Will Baskette was shot he left a widow and two sons, one of them was strong and hardy, the other, about sixteen, was delicate and unfit for rough outdoor life. This fact was well-known to the clergyman at Wolf’s Glow, the Rev. Ralph Boteler, who was really a benevolently-minded man.
The widow and her eldest son joined the gypsy tribe and abandoned the Swamp. The Rev. Ralph Boteler took the delicate Romy Baskette into his service as man of all work, meaning to help in the garden and clean the parson’s nag. Romy could not read, and the parson taught him—also to write. Being quiet and good-looking, the lad won on the vicar, who after a time found himself taking a deep interest in the friendless orphan. It ended in Romy leaving the garden and the stable, and being domiciled in the studio, where the parson filled his head with learning, not forgetting Latin and Greek.
The vicar was a single man, middle-aged, with very little thought beyond his own personal comfort, except that he liked to see the hounds throw off, being too stout to follow them. He had, however, one hobby; and, like other men who are moderate enough upon other topics, he was violence itself upon this. Of all the hobbies in the world, this parson’s fancy was geology—then just beginning to emerge as a real science.
The neighbours thought the vicar was as mad as a March hare on this one point. He grubbed up the earth in forty places with a small mattock he had made on purpose at the village blacksmith’s. He broke every stone in the district with a hammer which the same artisan made for him.
His craze was that the neighbourhood of Wolf’s Glow was rich in the two great stores of nature which make countries powerful—i.e. in Coal and Iron. He proved it in twenty ways. First, the very taste of the water, and the colour of the earth in the streams; by the nodules of dark, heavy stone which abounded; by the oily substance often found floating on the surface of ponds—rock oil; by the strata and the character of the fossils; by actual analysis of materials picked up by himself; lastly, by archaeology.
Wolf’s Glow! What was the meaning of that singular name? The only Glow in the county. Wolf was, perhaps, a man’s name in the centuries since. But Glow? Glow was, without a doubt, the ancient British for coal.
The people who argued against him—and they were all he met—ridiculed the idea of the ancient Britons knowing anything of coal. Boteler produced his authorities to show that they, and their conquerors the Romans, were perfectly familiar with that mineral. Wolf’s Glow was, in fact, Wolf’s Coal Pit. “Very well,” said the Objectors, “show us the coal pit, and we’ll believe.” This the vicar could not do, and was held to be mad accordingly.
But all this talking, and searching, and analysing made a deep impression upon the mind of young Romy Baskette, who was now hard upon twenty years of age. Boteler, really desirous
