The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop Read Online Free PDF Page B

trees.
    III
    Human curiosity is a strange and awe-inspiring thing. Felicity Broome’s first impulse on beholding the gleam of light among the trees had been to turn and run. She was on the path; she could find the road. Inside ten minutes she could be safely between the sheets of her bed. The upbringing of the modern girl, however, can scarcely be said to encourage the instinctive adoption of first impulses. More powerful than this deterrent was the force of curiosity. Who was walking in the Manor Woods at night? Why was he armed with a lantern? Could it be poachers? But what was there to poach? The recollection of Jim Redsey’s stealthy, strange manoeuvres with the spade flashed into her mind. Felicity, her fears forgotten, her curiosity lusting to be sated, crept cautiously along the path to get a nearer view.
    The first thing she saw was the Stone. There it crouched, a loathsome, toad-like thing, larger than ever in the semi-darkness. She herself was sheltering behind a pine. Away from her – in that most strange of symbols, a complete and perfect circle – stretched its tall upstanding brothers, a ring of witch’s sentries guarding unhallowed ground. Ten yards, or thereabouts, from the Stone, lantern in hand, like some gigantic, lumbering, hag-ridden will-o’-the-wisp, was Rupert Sethleigh’s cousin Redsey. Just as Felicity recognized him, he set down the lantern and began to dig.
    IV
    In less than a minute, Aubrey Harringay realized that he was hopelessly lost in the woods. The tree-trunks, crowding together, barred his progress. He tore his socks and shorts on briars and brambles, his woollen sweater caught on to low-growing branches, his face was soon scratched and bleeding, and, although he had explored the woods from end to end in daylight, he began to realize that they seemed a different place by night. He halted and listened. Suddenly, a few yards in front of him and a little to his right, the gleam of the hurricane lamp intensified the surrounding gloom.
    â€˜Doggo!’ thought Aubrey, hastily stepping aside and concealing himself behind a tree. He had gained the middle of the wood. He crept forward, from tree to tree, until he was in sight of his cousin. The hurricane lamp, now standing on the ground, shone on the glinting surface of the quartz-encrusted triangular block of granite which went by the name of the Stone of Sacrifice, or the Druids’ Altar. The tree behind which Aubrey’s wiry body was concealed chanced to be a massive, smooth-trunked beech, but immediately in front of him, surrounding the rude stone altar which occupied the centre of the clearing, was a circle of sighing pines whose tall, straight trunks rose dread and awesome, towering into the night sky like guardian spirits of the brooding Stone.
    Jim Redsey walked into the circle of light caused by the hurricane lamp and began to dig. The light loam was easy to move. Jim’s arms and body moved with rhythmic grace. The pile of earth beside him grew and grew.
    â€˜Great jumping cats!’ said Aubrey to himself. ‘The chap is trying to get through to Australia! What is the little game? Is he walking in his sleep?’
    Having effected a cavity some six feet long and of a fair depth – Aubrey judged it to be about three feet down – Jim laid down the spade. Then he stepped down into the hole very carefully and disappeared from view.
    â€˜Chap must be off his chump!’ thought Aubrey, more amused than uneasy at these curious manoeuvres. ‘Must be sleep-walking! Thinks he’s in bed now, I expect. Wonder whether I ought to wake him up? Old Tompkins says it’s dangerous to wake up sleep-walkers. They go loony or something. Wonder what I’d better do? Anyway, I’ll pinch the spade before he can do any damage with it.’
    He was about to act upon this idea when Jim Redsey’s head and shoulders appeared above the hole in the ground, and he stood up, stepped