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By Root 342 0

and gouges of an old peat works, I ran, up a rise and down the other side and splashed three steps into the bog that stretched out there before my interior alarm sounded. I backed out laboriously, the muck holding fast at my boots and calves and only letting go with a slow sucking noise. I staggered when my heels hit solid ground and I sat down hard, then got to my feet and searched the basin. Rushes, Holmes had said, look for footing among the rushes, and indeed, along the edges of the bog stood tussocks of thick grass in a rough semicircle. Following those proved heavy going, but I did not sink in past my lowest bootlaces, and I made the other side of the mire with no further harm. Up that hill I went, and there below me, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, lay the beam of a single torch, lying, by the looks of it, on the ground, motionless.

I nervously checked to be sure the shotgun was loaded and went forward stealthily until I could make out the dark figure sitting on the ground beside the light. My heart gave one great thud of relief, like a shout, and subsided.

"Holmes?" I said. "I thought I heard a shot."

He turned at my voice, and then looked back at the terrain before him. "You did," he said. "He would not allow me to approach."

"Approach?" I asked, and walked up to stand by his side. His boots were mere clots of black, viscous mud, as were his trouser legs past his knees.

I played my torch beyond him to see what he was staring at, and saw there at our feet a stretch of smooth, finely textured turf, looking as if someone had spread a large carpet of some pale green stuff across the floor of the moor. On the side nearest us the carpet appeared scuffed, and the torchlight picked out some gleaming black substance splashed across the centre of it that I realised must be mud. The rest of the surface was pristine. A quaking bog, Holmes had called it. A featherbed, was Baring-Gould's jocular name: a bed beneath which Ketteridge now slept.

Holmes inclined his head at it. "The moor took him," he said, and scrubbed tiredly at his face with both hands. "He got halfway across before he broke through. I tried to pull him out, but he held the gun on me until the last minute, until only his hand and his eyes were above the surface. He shot at me when I tried to…I did attempt to save him."

I bent down to pick up his torch, and when I had put it in his hand I allowed my fingers to rest briefly on the back of his neck. "You said it yourself, Holmes. The moor took him. Come, let us go home."

TWENTY-SIX

In my advanced old age I really entertain more delight in the beauties of Nature and of Art than I did in my youth. Appreciation of what is good and true and comely grows with years, and this growth, I feel sure, is no more to be quenched by death than is the life of the caddis-worm when it breaks forth as the may fly. I do not look back upon the past and say, "All is dead!" What I repeat in my heart, as I watch the buds unfold, and the cuckoo-flowers quivering in the meadow, and I inhale the scent of the pines in the forest, and hear the spiral song of the lark is "All is Promise."

—Further Reminiscences

We did go home, to our own home on the Sussex Downs, soon after that. First, however, we had one final task to perform on the moor.

Three days after the police had dragged Richard Ketteridge's body from the grip of the quaking bog, we borrowed the dead man's touring car, stripped of its costume and restored to its Dunlops, and drove it up to the door of Lew House. While the bronze goose-herd looked on, we piled the passenger seat high with pillows, loaded the boot with a picnic of cold roast goose with sage and onion stuffing, mutton sandwiches, and honey wine, and waited while the squire of Lew Trenchard took his place on the cushions. We tucked the old man in with travelling rugs and placed a hot brick beneath his shoes, and with Holmes at his side and myself driving, we took the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould up onto the moor for one last earthly look at that region he loved best in all the world.