"Come, don't get cross. You don't look so amiable as you did. Will you please explain to their Worships how it comes that a man whose clothes were spick and span when you saw him at the Fair, and spick and span when he called at 'The Warren House,' as I can prove by the landlord, was a mass of mud from head to foot when you landed him at the lock-up?" "He got it i' th' tussle, aw reckon." "What, among the rain-washed bracken?" And Tom stammered and looked this way and that, any way but at Mr. Blackburn, and then lapsed into sulky silence. Mr. Blackburn beamed on him as though he loved him, and said persuasively: "Now, after all, doesn't it look as if this terrible tussle took place on the road and not in the Plantation?" But Tom wouldn't say yea or nay to this. He only glowered, and Mr. Blackburn, who had now risen vastly in my opinion, glanced meaningly at the Bench, shrugged his massive shoulders, and started on a new tack. "About these hares now? Stock does, you say they are?" "Anything particular about _them_?" "Not 'at aw know on. What sud there be. A hare's a hare, an' that's all there is to 't." "Have you examined this particular brace?" "Not I. Why sud aw?" "Not looked at their teeth?" "Noa." "Well, would you mind doing so now?" Very gingerly Tom did as he was bid. "Two front teeth snapped off in each hare, aren't there? Pass them up to their Worships, constable, and let them see for themselves." "It certainly looks as if the two incisors had been snapped sharply off," said the Chairman. "In each hare, too, most extraordinary." "Yes, a strange coincidence," agreed Mr. Blackburn. "How do _you_ account for it?" he asked suddenly of the gamekeeper. "It's none o' my business," said Tom surlily. "Aw didn't come here to be badgered abaat teeth. Aw come here to tell a plain tale, an' aw done so, an' yo' may tak' it or leave it as yo' like." "Pre-cisely, a plain, unvarnished tale. Just, no doubt, the same plain, unvarnished tale your father, your venerable and most respectable father, will tell. Oh, you needn't look round the Court for him. He's in the lobby out of earshot. But about those snapped incisors now. Surely you've a theory?" "Not I." "Perhaps the animals were mother and daughter, and snapped incisors run in the family," suggested Mr. Blackburn. But Tom was in no mood to appreciate a jest. On the contrary, he looked very ill at ease, and, though the day was none of the warmest, wiped the sweat from his flushed and heated brow with the back of his huge hand. "I'll bet I could tell what Tom 'ud like better nor a pint o' ale just nah," whispered Jim to me. "What?" I asked. "Two Pints," quoth Jim who was evidently on very good terms with himself. "Well, I think I haven't much more to ask you, my good man," Mr. Blackburn was saying, and seemed on the point of sitting down, to Tom o' Bill's manifest relief. "Ah, yes, by-the-bye, you may as well tell me as your father--what did you do with the other two hares?"