"It got to be a race towards the end, for the poor man fell away all of a sudden after three o'clock. Nature gived out, as it will sometimes, like a douted candle. He'd forgot all about everything afore he died. Only his grave stuck in his mind, and I read over the epitaph till I was weary of it. Then he went frightened all of a sudden. 'To think o' me lying there alone among dead folk of evenings, wi' nought but the leather-birds[1] squeaking over the graves,' he said. 'You won't be there, my dear,' I told him. 'You'll be up where there's no sun nor yet moon, bathing for evermore in the light of righteousness.' Then he flickered and he flickered, and wandered in his speech, and the last words I could catch was, 'What's all this pucker about? I shall be my own man again in a day or two.' He was hollow-eyed and his nose growed so sharp as a cobbler's awl, poor dear, and I knowed he'd soon be out of his misery. His wife was along with him when he died, her and the two daughters; and poor Hester--Hester I call her, for she let me use the Christian name without a murmur--she was cut in half listening to his death-rattle o' one side and hoping to hear her son Rupert gallop up 'pon the other. 'Twas a race, as I say; but Rupert had been long ways off to work, and Ned had to find him, and what with one thing and another, his father had been out of the world twenty good minutes afore he came. He runned up the stairs white from the clay-works. But there was only more clay on the bed to welcome him. I left 'em at that sacred moment, as my custom is, and went down house, and was just in time to see Humphrey Baskerville ride up in hot haste on his one-eyed pony. 'How is it with him?' he said, getting off very spry. 'I hope, as he could send for me, that he finds hisself better.' 'Not at all,' I answered him. 'The poor man sent because he was worse, and felt himself slipping away.' 'Then I'd best be quick,' he replied to me; and I broke it to him that 'twas too late. 'He's gone, sir,' I said. 'Like the dew upon the fleece he be gone. Half an hour ago he died, and suffered very little at the end, so far as a mortal but experienced woman can tell you.' He stared slap through me, in that awful way he has, then he turned his back and got up on his beast and rode off without a word or a sign. Lord, He knows what that old pony must have thought of it all. 'Twas sweating and staggering, and, no doubt, full of wonder and rage at being pushed along so fast." [1] _Leather-birds_--bats. END OF FIRST BOOK BOOK II CHAPTER I Upon the highway between Cadworthy and the border village of Cornwood there stands an ancient granite cross. For many years the broken head reposed in the heather; then it was lifted upon the pedestal again and the vanished shaft restored. To north and south the white road sweeps by it; easterly tower Penshiel and Pen Beacon, and westerly rolls Shaugh Moor.