, there, one afternoon as I was in that there tower,
a-reading of a newspaper that Jim had brought me the night before, I
hears wheels on that moorland road, and I looked out through a convenient
loophole, and who should I see but Peter Chatfield in that old pony trap
of his. He was coming along from the direction of Scarhaven, and when he
got abreast of the tower he pulled up, got out, left his pony to crop the
grass and came strolling over in my direction. Of course, I wasn't
afraid of him--there's so many ways in and out of that old peel as there
is out of a rabbit-warren--besides, I felt certain he was there on some
job of his own. Well, he comes up to the edge of the glen, and he looks
into it and round it, and up and down at the tower, and he wanders about
the heaps of fallen masonry that there is there, and finally he puts
thumbs in his armhole and went slowly back to his trap. 'But you'll be
coming back, my old swindler!' says I to myself. 'You'll be back again I
doubt not at all!' And back he did come--that very night. Oh, yes!"

"Alone?" asked Copplestone.

"A-lone!" replied Spurge. "It had got to be dark, and I was thinking of
going to sleep, having nought else to do and not expecting cousin Jim
that night, when I heard the sound of horses' feet and of wheels. So I
cleared out of my hole to where I could see better. Of course, it was
Chatfield--same old trap and pony--but this time he came from Norcaster
way. Well, he gets out, just where he'd got out before, and he leads the
pony and trap across the moor to close by the tower. I could tell by the
way that trap went over the grass that there was some sort of a load in
it and it wouldn't have surprised me, gentlemen, if the old reptile had
brought a dead body out of it. After a bit, I hear him taking something
out, something which he bumped down on the ground with a thump--I counted
nine o' them thumps. And then after a bit I heard him begin a moving of
some of the loose masonry what lies in such heaps at the foot o' the peel
tower--dark though it was there was light enough in the sky for him to
see to do that. But after he'd been at it some time, puffing and groaning
and grunting, he evidently wanted to see better, and he suddenly flashed
a light on things from one o' them electric torches. And then I see--me
being not so many yards away from him--nine small white wood boxes, all
clamped with metal bands, lying in a row on the grass, and I see, too,
that Chat