“Henry Turley was one of those awkward old chaps as had more money than he knowed what to do wi'. Shadrach we called him, the silly man. He had worked for it, worked hard for it, but when he was old he stuck to his fortune and wouldn’t spend a sixpence of it on his comforts. What a silly man!”
 
The thatcher, who was thus talking of Henry Turley (long since dead and gone) in the “Black Cat” of Starncombe, was himself perhaps fifty years old. Already there was a crank of age or of dampness or of mere custom in most of his limbs, but he was bluff and gruff and hale enough, with a bluffness of manner that could only offend a fool—and fools never listened to him.
 
“Shadrach—that’s what we called him—was a good man wi’ cattle, a masterpiece; he would strip a cow as clean as a tooth and you never knowed a cow have a bad quarter as Henry Turley ever milked. And when he was buried he was buried with all that money in his coffin, holding it in his hand, I reckon. He had plenty of relations—you wouldn’t know ’em, it is thirty years ago I be speaking of—but it was all down in black and white so’s no one could touch it. A lot of people in these parts had a right to some of it, Jim Scarrott for one, and Issy Hawker a bit, Mrs. Keelson, poor woman, ought to have had a bit, and his own brother, Mark Turley; but he left it in the will as all his fortune was to be buried in the coffin along of him. ’Twas cruel, but so it is and so it will229 be, for whenever such people has a shilling to give away they goes and claps it on some fat pig’s haunches. The foolishness! Sixty pounds it was, in a canister, and he held it in his hand.”
 
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said a mild-faced man sitting in the corner. “Henry Turley never did a deed like that.”
 
“What?” growled the thatcher with unusual ferocity.
 
“Coorse I’m not disputing what you’re saying, but he never did such a thing in his life.”
 
“Then you calls me a liar?”
 
“Certainly not. O no, don’t misunderstand me, but Henry Turley never did any such thing, I can’t believe it of him.”
 
“Huh! I be telling you facts, and facts be true one way or another. Now you waunts to call over me, you waunts to know the rights of everything and the wrongs of nothing.”
 
“Well,” said the mild-faced man, pushing his pot toward the teller of tales, “I might believe it to-morrow, but it’s a bit of a twister now, this minute!”
 
“Ah, that’s all right then”—the thatcher was completely mollified. “Well the worst part of the case was his brother Mark. Shadrach served him shameful, treated him like a dog. (Good health!) Ah, like a dog. Mark was older nor him, about seventy, and he lived by himself in a little house out by the hanging pust, not much of a cottage, it warn’t—just wattle and daub wi’ a thetch o’ straa'—but the lease was running out 230(‘twas a lifehold affair) and unless he bought this little house for fifty pound he’d got to go out of it. Well, old Mark hadn’t got no fifty pounds, he was ate up wi’ rheumatics and only did just a little light labour in the woods, they might as well a’ asked him for the King’s crown, so he said to his master: Would he lend him the fifty pounds?
 
“‘No, I can’t do that,’ his master says.
 
“‘You can reduct it from my wages,’ Mark says.
 
“‘Nor I can’t do that neither,’ says his master, ‘but there’s your brother Henry, he’s worth a power o’ money, ask him.‘ So Mark asks Shadrach to lend him the fifty pounds, so’s he could buy this little house. ’No,’ says Henry, ‘I can’t.’ Nor he wouldn’t. Well—old Mark says to him: ‘I doan wish you no harm Henry,’ he says, ‘but I hope as how you’ll die in a ditch.’ (Good health!) And sure enough he did. That was his own brother, he were strooken wi’ the sun and died in a ditch, Henry did, and when he was buried his fortune was buried with him, in a little canister, holding it in his hand, I reckons. And a lot of good that was to him! He hadn’t been buried a month when two bad parties putt their heads together. Levi Carter, one was, he was the sexton, a man that was half a loony as I always thought. O yes, he had got all his wits about him, somewheres, only they didn’t often get much of a quorum, still he got them—somewheres. T’other was a chap by the name of Impey, lived in Slack the shoemaker’s house down by the old traveller’s garden. He wasn’t much of a mucher, helped in the fieldwork and did shepherding at odd times. And these two chaps made up their minds to goo and collar Henry231 Turley’s fortune out of his coffin one night and share it between theirselves. ’Twas crime, ye know, might a been prison for life, but this Impey was a bad lot—he’d the manners of a pig, pooh! filthy!—and I expects he persuaded old Levi on to do it. Bad as body-snatchen, coorse ’twas!
 
“So they goos together one dark night, ’long in November it was, and well you knows, all of you, as well as I, that nobody can’t ever see over our churchyard wall by day let alone on a dark night. You all knows that, don’t you?” asserted the thatcher, who appeared to lay some stress upon this point in his narrative. There were murmurs of acquiescence by all except the mild-faced man, and the thatcher continued: “‘Twere about nine o’clock when they dug out the earth. ’Twarn’t a very hard job, for Henry was only just a little way down. He was buried on top of his old woman, and she was on top of her two daughters. But when they got down to the coffin Impey didn’t much care for that part of the job, he felt a little bit sick, so he gives the hammer and the screwdriver to Levi and he says: ’Levi,’ he says, ‘are you game to make a good job o’ this?’
 
“‘Yes, I be,’ says old Levi.
 
“‘Well, then,’ Impey says, ‘yous’ll have my smock on now while I just creeps off to old Wannaker’s sheep and collars one of they fat lambs over by the 'lotments.’
 
............