ad body.

I was gripping my throat in my hand; I was trying desperately to cry
out.

Whether the idiot actually touched the body or not I cannot say, but he
must have realised in his poor, bemused brain that the thing was dead.

He cried out with his horrible, inhuman cry, turned, and ran up the lane
towards me. He fell on his face a few yards from me, scrambled wildly to
his feet again and came on yelping and shrieking. He was wildly,
horribly afraid. I caught sight of his face as he passed me, and his
mouth was distorted into a square, his upper lip horribly drawn up over
his ragged, yellow teeth. Suddenly he dashed at the hedge and clawed his
way through. I heard him still yelping appallingly as he rushed away
across the field....

CHAPTER XVIII

IMPLICATIONS

I

The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental death."

If there had been any traces of a struggle, I had not noticed them when
I came to the edge of the pond. There may have been marks as if a foot
had slipped. I was not thinking of evidence when I looked into the
water.

There were marks enough when the police came to investigate, but they
were the marks made by a twelve-stone man in hobnail boots, who had
scrambled into, and out of, the pond. As the inspector said, it was not
worth while wasting any time in looking for earlier traces of footsteps
below those marks.

Nor were there any signs of violence on the body. It was in no way
disfigured, save by the action of the water, in which it had lain for
perhaps eighteen hours.

There was, indeed, only one point of any significance from the jury's
point of view, and that they put on one side, if they considered it at
all; the body was pressed into the mud.

The Coroner asked a few questions about this fact.

Was the mud very soft? Yes, very soft, liquid on top.

How was the body lying? Face downwards.

What part of the body was deepest in the mud? The chest. The witness
said he had hard work to get the upper part of the body released; the
head was free, but the mud held the rest. "The mooad soocked like," was
the expressive phrase of the witness.

The Coroner passed on to other things. Had any one a spite against the
child? and such futilities. Only once more did he revert to that
solitary significant fact. "Would it be possible," he asked of the
abashed and self-conscious labourer, "would it be possible for the body
to have worked its way down into the soft mud as you have described