fter that no more was to be learned. The light vehicle which had
bounded from side to side of the narrow drove-road had certainly been
empty. I am no Sherlock Holmes, but my father and I know about horses
and local conveyances. And we could see by the rebounding, the one
wheel climbing the bank, and the other sinking in the slough, that if
any one had been inside--nay any _thing_, the contents of the cart, be
they what they would, must have been emptied out.

But Harry, the mail bags, even the parcels for Bewick, had completely
disappeared. Nothing except the empty cart and the broad plane-tree
leaves were ever seen again. It seemed so simple a thing to trace--a
dead body, accounted no easy thing to make away with even
professionally, a dozen bags of letters--many with negotiable values,
of which the issuing bank had, luckily, reserved the numbers--tobacco
in tins, cigarettes in boxes, sweets, sugar in cones, even a Stilton
cheese for the old bachelor, Major Templand (retired), who cried out
more about the loss of his Welsh rabbit than all the others put
together. Clues--there were balls and wads of clues! Only, none of
them led anywhere. Neither did the woods, through which there was no
track of anything previous to those made by Mr. Stennis's pony the
following day. Nothing either way along the road. No, I could put my
hand on nothing and nobody. And I gave it up at last, sure
nevertheless that it was somewhere about the house of Deep Moat that
the solution must be looked for.

And, indeed, some light, such as it was, came from the last quarter
from which it could be expected.

Mr. Ablethorpe arrived one fine summer afternoon at our place in
Breckonside. I was playing in the backyard, half a dozen dogs tumbling
over me. It had been intended that I should go out that afternoon with
a van, but somehow one of the men had got back earlier from his morning
round, and had been re-dispatched as more trustworthy. Also idleness
in a boy was bad enough, but in a man paid weekly wages--insupportable.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Yarrow," cried the curate in his hearty voice,
loud but not a bit preachy--I give him that due--"can I have your Joe
an hour or two?"

"Have him and keep him, the lazy whelp," cried my father from the back
shop, where he was busy writing up his books in his shirt sleeves.
Then, laying down his pen where it would not roll over the page (which
always roused him to crisply expressed anger), he c