Then came suspicion and watchfulness on the part of the keepers, combined one night with a nasty fray in which guns were used and a man was killed. The offenders got off, however, and could not be sworn to. Kit knew the police were on the alert, and would not allow his father to run risks. They both kept quiet for a while, and Kit, without the excitement that mastered him, was a miserable man. Hartas had the itching palm but Kit the young blood. Do and dare he must. And he did, once too often. He succeeded in eluding the keepers and not a soul at the Mires would have betrayed him; but Elias Constantine, shepherding on a sheep-gait which Mr. Severn had taken over unknown to him, happened to look over a wall as he was in the act of taking a moor-bird out of the snare. To Elias, whose respect for the law and all time-worn institutions was inbred and unbounded, it seemed that he was an instrument in the hands of Providence for bringing the offender to justice. Here were grouse, and the Admiral's grouse, going by dozens into a poacher's sack! Here also, in all probability, was the man who had fired the shot that killed the under-keeper. If that had not been murder, it was manslaughter. He watched the scientific process for some time, the disentangling of the birds' legs from the cunning wire-loop, the flutters of the exhausted victims, the final twist of the necks, the re-setting of the snares. Then he gave a sign to his collie. A bound over the wall, a rush through the ling and the dog was at the man's throat and bearing him to the ground! All was over with Kit and he knew it. He would make a clean breast of it, too, over that gun-shot, be the consequence what it might. But he managed to save his father, who was busy at the dub, by a warning whistle. The dim morning light covered Hartas's escape. But Kit was given up to the wrath of a scandalised bench of game-preserving magistrates and thence to trial by judge and jury. They inflicted upon him the full penalty of the law, on a conviction for manslaughter. CHAPTER IV JOY AND SORROW JOIN HANDS