out of breath with running. He rubbed his forehead with a
red pocket handkerchief, looked round in a dazed manner at the assembled
group, and at length said hoarsely: "Mrs Greenways bin here?"

"Ah, just gone!" said both the women at once.

"There's trouble up yonder--on the hill," said Daniel, pointing with his
thumb over his shoulder, and speaking in a strange, broken voice.

"Mary White's baby!" exclaimed Mrs Pinhorn.

"Fits!" added Mrs Wishing; "they all went off that way."

"Hang the baby," muttered Daniel. He made his way past the women, who
had pressed up close to him, to where the cobbler and Dimbleby stood.

"I've fetched the doctor," he said, "and she wants the Greenways to know
it; I thought maybe she'd be here."

"What is it? Who's ill?" asked the cobbler.

"Tain't anyone that's ill," answered Daniel; "he's stone dead. They
shot him right through the heart."

"Who? Who?" cried all the voices together.

"I found him," continued Daniel, "up in the woods; partly covered up
with leaves he was. Smiling peaceful and stone dead. He was always a
brave feller and done his dooty, did James White on the hill. But he
won't never do it no more."

"Poachers!" exclaimed Dimbleby in a horror-struck voice.

"Poachers it was, sure enough," said Daniel; "an' he's stone dead, James
White is. They shot him right through the heart. Seems a pity such a
brave chap should die like that."

"An' him such a good husband!" said Mrs Wishing. "An' the baby an' all
as we was just talking on," said Mrs Pinhorn; "well, it's a fatherless
child now, anyway."

"The family ought to allow the widder a pension," said Mr Dimbleby,
"seeing as James White died in their service, so to speak."

"They couldn't do no less," agreed the cobbler.

The idea of fetching Mrs Greenways seemed to have left Daniel's mind
for the present: he had now taken a chair, and was engaged in answering
the questions with which he was plied on all sides, and in trying to fix
the exact hour when he had found poor James White in the woods. "As it
might be here, and me standing as it might be there," he said,
illustrating his words with the different parcels on the counter before
him. It was not until all this was thoroughly understood, and every
imaginable expression of pity and surprise had been uttered, that Mrs
Pinhorn remembered that the "Greenways ought to know. And I don't see
why," she added, seizing her basket with sudden energy, "I sho