HOUNDS PASTURE

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3309, 1 April 1926, Page 12

HOUNDS PASTURE

'Rs/ l/i hcenf Co/mei

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS.

Tliorroldan Priory, a grim old house at tli e edge of the North Yorkshire moors is the centre of a grim and baffling mystery. A hound howls; a stranger arrives. This man, Magerison, takes up his quarters in the place. He has sonic hold over Thorrold the master of the Priory. He presumes on this to tell Dorotny Thorrold, the old man’s granddaughter, that ho intends to make her his wife. Magerison proves, and forces Thorrold to admit, that John Barnaby who has worked as a servant in the Priory is in reality the next heir, and, Dorothy’s brother. Looking for the hound Barnaby Is shot in the shoulder, by someone hiding in Hound’s Pacture, a held in which a treasure, hidden by monks, is said to be buried. The wound turns out to have Deen caused by a diamond, not a bullet! A duck shot in Hound’s Pasture has its crop filled with gems worth two thousand pounds. Whil c examining them, Margerison is attacked —by a ghostly monk, says Dorotny, who saw, the thing “materialise” behind him. He is knocked unconscious and the jewels are stolen. Dorothy now betrays her love for him. Together they resolve to solve the mystery. No on e is found in the locked room in which the attack was made but, while searching, a spectral figure of a monk is seen. Magerison fires at it but it is not harmed! Dorothy, accidentally grips a carved boss of oak and she and-Magerison fall together through a secret aperture in the wall. Old Thorrold bursts open the study door and Igod, his confidential servant, and he, quarrel. Igod accuses his master of being—a murderer! Meanwhile Margerison and Dorothy Thorrold explore the place into which they fell on the opening of the secret panel. They find themselves in a deserted lead mine gallery beneath the Priory, xgod and Thorrold, baffled by the pair’s disappearance, decide to join forces. While they are talking Richard Leathley, Thorrold’s enemy, suddenly appears—seemingly from nowhere! Old Igod, the Master of Thorroldan and Leathley confer; Leathley traps "himself—informing the two autocrats of the Priory that he is at their mercy. Meanwhile Magerison and Dorothy are busily exploring under the Priory, in the old lead mines. They find in a subterranean chamber the body—long dead —of Thorrold, the Master of Thorroldan.

CHAPTER XXI. DEATH AND TREASURE.

When, in that grim stone chamber far below the surface of Hound’s Pasture, Basil iMagerison and Dorothy Thorrold found the mummified thing that sat at a crumbling table with its dead feet in the fire-bosom-cd dust of a treasure worth a king’s ransom —no other emotion was greater in their minds than the sudden and awfully overwhelming desire for light. Panic—fear —dread horror, all these, in their degree, were submerged beneath the elemental terror of darkness which possessed them. The glitter from the rift in the spar which inlet moonlight and the cool air of the moorlands above them was not sufficient

. , . light, broad, glaring -wild light they craved; and, prayed for. —Magerison, calmer, then thought of something.—ln his pocket was an oil flask belonging to his gun. In that flask was tow for cleaning purposes. In another pocket he had a few cartridges—then, he had his matches. He steadily assessed his wealth in such simple things, and, how best to apply it to immediate needs. Thinking of the tinder-like shoring bauks set up all along the long deserted mine gallery, he arrived at a decision . . .

So it came about that, after the opening up of three cartridges and the tearing down of sundry pieces of crumbling timber —by .use of oil, tow and matches —he furnished himself with a most admirable supply of torches, and Dorothy Thorrold, like some fair deniaen of olden caves, fanned a steadily growing fire set in a hole in the thick peat-tan that made the floor of the monkish tunnels so resilient, to the feet and so sweet to the nostrils. She crouched there —fifty yards from the mouth of that horrid den of death —and kept her soothing flames at a cheerful height what time her mate, flaming. brand stuck in a rock crevice, the chamber. This dead thing was the counterpart of Thorrold; as has been said. But, it was as though the Master of Thorroldan Priory had necn frozen with the ice touch of youth in some earlier day . - the same massive head was there; the same wave of iron grey hair, going back to whiteness; the same .hands; the same fierce jaw; the same close-set Saxon ears and the same high-ridged Saxon cheek bones. But each attribute, despite long death, betrayed its subtle difference from the living Thorrold. Here a tiny contrast; there a small halt between identical likeness and merely likeness • • • youth had been on this dead thing s brow when it was that ho had died. That was the difference —that, accentuated bv the old fashioned clothing, still adhering dustily and greenly to the skeleton body. Before the body was the rude table on which the living man had been rvorking at the moment precedent to his death ... it was plain to be seen in what he had been engaged. For ho had been counting, miserlike, his strange hoard; that load of

wealth in plate and pearls and gems and manuscripts that the monks of Thorroldan Priory had hidden at the time of the Reformation. Thick with dust a diary was open on the table before the dead hand and on it lay a shrivelled and split-up piece of cedar wood which had been a pencil. The graphite had long gone to impalpable dust; as graphite in the presence of lead will do , . . Basil Magerison secured tne diary, dusted it, and read: ‘Plate —probably seven hundred jounces, must of it silver gilt but of a rare workmanship. Memo: Make guarded enquiries about worth of silver gilt work of fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Communion cups and plate all in fine gold. Memo: This should be kept separately and offered to the Archbishop: it would be a shameful tiling if Moresby got his evil fingers on ft. Pearls—most of them scarred; acid action. Small loose ones gone to dust; of remainder 74 large ones ranging from size of a pea to that of a marble, perfect in their orient and shape. Worth, at least, £20,000. Diamonds: 67; from splinters used to pierce the heads of the two silver croziers in chest A to tire big ones found in chest B; evidently tribute of some kind, for they had been placed in a sealed leather bag. Seals suspiciously lik e that of the Thorrold family—what rogues those old monks were! Emeralds: fifteen Memo: This is strange, having regard to the vogue which the “Aaronic stone” had among the old pre-Re-formation clerics. Must be some more somewhlere. Search in east gallery later; beneath tombs of men killed and burled in the lead workings. Topaz—innumerable pieces. Not so very valuable; to be counted carefully later. A relic containing icinerated bone with a Latin inscription later to be interpreted. This is alabaster; probably the remains are those of an early Roman martyr. Memo: Offer to Minster authorities or, to Archbishop personally. Again a treasure that Moresby must not be allowed to handle. This list completes work for the day: October 23rd, 1897. Still two chests unopened. Memo: George Shackleton tells me that Leathley was seen in Thewle last night and I am to ” And there the last chronicle of the man, who had died, under the earth, broke off.

Magcrison looked long and earnestly at the dead thing, then reverently laid the diary by its quiet hand. He went back to Dorothy Thorrold and her fire. “The mystery of Hound's Pasture,” he stated gravely, “is solved in its entirety!” “Who —who, was he?” She nodded toward the stone death chamber.

“Your grandfather’s twin brother,” Magerison’s voice was passionless and weary. “Killed by Leathley or —or by your grandfather to gain on the one hand the inheritance of the treasure . , on the. other the inheritance of the Priory.” (To be Continued.)