The Vast Abyss. Fenn George Manville

a loud scratching noise, a line of light, and a wax-match flashed out, and then burned steadily, lighting up Uncle Richard’s stern face and the little bedroom, as he stood a couple of yards back from the window.

      “Now, sir, if you please,” came in severe tones. “What is the meaning of this?”

      Chapter Eleven

      It did not mean apples nor pears from the garden, for they were nearly as hard as wood, and it did not mean going out to carry on some game with a companion, for Tom knew no one there.

      Uncle Richard was aware of this when he heard Tom stealing down the trellis, and peeped at him from a darkened window. Hence his stern question.

      “Oh, uncle!” said Tom, in a subdued voice, “how you frightened me.”

      “I’m glad of it, sir,” said Uncle Richard, holding the little match to the candle and increasing the illumination as Tom climbed in. “I meant to. Now, sir, if you please, explain.”

      “Yes, uncle,” said Tom calmly, and making his uncle frown.

      “The impudent young dog!” he said to himself; and then he stood nodding his head, and gradually growing more satisfied that he had after all been right in his estimate of his nephew, though the night’s business had rather shaken his faith.

      “Then you didn’t make out who it was, Tom,” he said, when Tom had explained.

      “No, uncle; it was very stupid of me, I suppose.”

      “Very foolish to be guilty of such an escapade.”

      “Foolish!” said Tom, growing more damped than before; “but he was stealing the ironwork.”

      “Yes, evidently carrying it off; but it was old iron.”

      “But it was just as bad to steal old iron as new, uncle,” said Tom.

      “Ahem! yes, of course, my boy; but you must not be so venturesome. I mean that it was not worth while for you to risk being stricken down for the sake of saving some rubbish. Thieves are reckless when caught.”

      “I wasn’t thinking of saving the old iron, uncle; I wanted to see who it was, so as to be able to tell you. I didn’t think of being knocked down.”

      “Well, perhaps it was all a mistake, Tom,” said Uncle Richard, “for it was in the dark.”

      “Yes, uncle, but I feel sure that some one was helping himself to the pieces of iron.”

      “Look in the morning, my boy. Get to bed now, and never do such a thing as that again. Good-night.”

      Uncle Richard nodded to the boy kindly enough and left him, while Tom soon turned in to bed, to lie dreaming that the man came back to fetch more iron, and kept on carrying it off till it was all gone. Then he came back again, lifted the mill sails as if they were mere twigs, and took them away, and lastly he was in the act of picking up one of the millstones, and putting it on his head, when Tom awoke, and found that it was a bright sunshiny morning.

      It did not take him very long dressing, by which time it was nearly six, and he hurried down so as to get into the mill-yard before the carpenters came to work.

      Sure enough, when he reached the heap of iron in the left-hand corner of the place, it was plain to see that a number of small pieces had been taken away, for not only had the heap been disturbed by some being removed, but the surface looked black, and not rusty like the rest, showing that a new surface had been exposed.

      Satisfied that he was right, and there being no embargo placed upon his acting now, Tom went over the ground he had traversed the night before, and upon reaching the corner of the yard close to the lane, he came upon the spot where the bag must have been rested in getting it over; and as ill-luck would have it for the thief, the head of a great nail stuck out from between two bricks, a nail such as might have been used for the attaching of a clothes-line. This head had no doubt caught and torn the bag, for an iron screw nut lay on the top of the bricks.

      Tom seized it, leaped the wall, and got into the lane, to find another nut in the road just where his uncle’s field ended, and the narrow path went down between the two hedges.

      This was a means of tracking, and, eager now to trace the place where the thief must have turned off, Tom went on with his hunt, to find the spot easily enough just at the corner of a potato field, where the hedge was so thin that a person could easily pass through.

      “This must have been the place,” thought Tom. “Yes, so it is. Hurrah!” he cried, and pressing against the hedge the hawthorn gave way on each side, and he pounced upon a piece of iron lying on the soft soil between two rows of neatly earthed-up potatoes. Better still, there were the deeply-marked footprints of some one who wore heavy boots, running straight between the next two rows, and following this step by step, Tom found two more nuts before he reached, the hedge on the other side of the field, and passed out into the lane in front of the straggling patch of cottages, from one of which the blue wood smoke was rising, and a little way off an old bent woman was going toward the stream which ran through this part of the village. She was carrying a tin kettle, and evidently on her way to fill it for breakfast.

      Tom stopped in this lane undecided as to which way to go, for the thief might just as likely have passed to the left or right of these to another part of the village as have entered one of them.

      He looked for the footprints, but they were only visible in the freshly-hoed field. There was not a sign in the hard road, and feeling now that he was at fault, he walked slowly down the lane, and then returned along the path close in front of the cottages. Just as he reached the gate leading into the patch of garden belonging to the one with the open door, and from which came the crackling of burning wood, his attention was taken by the loud yawning of some one within, and a large screw lying upon the crossbar of the palings which separated this garden from the next.

      This screw was about four yards from the little gate, and it might have belonged to the occupants, but, as Tom darted in, certain that it was part of the plunder, he saw that it was muddy and wet, and just in front of him there was its imprint in the damp path, where it had evidently been trampled in and then picked out.

      Tom felt certain now; and just then the little gate swung to, giving a bang which brought the yawner to the doorway in the person of the big lad who had shouted after Uncle Richard on the afternoon of Tom’s first arrival, and next morning had been caught poaching. In fact, there was a ferrets’ cage under the window with a couple of the creatures thrusting out their little pink noses as if asking to be fed.

      The boys’ eyes met, and there was no sleepiness in the bigger one’s eyes as he caught sight of the screw in Tom’s hand.

      “Here!” he cried, rushing at him and trying to seize the piece of iron; “what are you doing here? That’s mine.”

      “No, it isn’t,” cried Tom sturdily. “How did it come here?”

      “What’s that to you? You give that here, or it’ll be the worse for you.”

      “Where did you get it?” cried Tom.

      “It’s no business of yours,” cried the lad savagely. “Give it up, will yer.”

      He seized Tom by the collar with both hands, and tried then to snatch away the screw, but Tom held on with his spirit rising; and as the struggle went on, in another minute he would have been striking out fiercely, had not there been an interruption in the arrival of the old woman with the newly-filled kettle.

      “Here, what’s this?” she croaked, in a peculiarly hoarse voice; and as Tom looked round he found himself face to face with a keen-eyed, swarthy, wrinkled old woman, whose untended grey hair hung in ragged locks about her cheeks, and whose hooked nose and prominent chin gave her quite the aspect of some old witch as fancied by an artist for a book.

      “Do you hear, Pete, who’s this?” she cried again, before the lad could answer. “What does he want?”

      “Says that old iron screw’s his, granny.”

      “What, that?” cried the old woman, making a snatch with her thin long-nailed finger at