“I shan’t frighten him!” he answered. “Persuasion goes further than force. Good afternoon!” he continued pleasantly, as they came nearer the object of their search. “Are you James Roper?”
“That’s mine,” said Blick, producing one of his professional cards. “You may have heard of me. I’m staying at the Sceptre.”
Roper took the card, glanced at it and at Blick, and handed it back, unconcernedly.
“Heard something o’ the sort,” he answered.
Blick sat down on the fallen pine, and pulled out his pipe and tobacco.
“I wanted to know if you couldn’t give me a bit of information, Roper,” he said. “You live hereabouts, don’t you?”
“Close by,” replied Roper, in tones which signified that it was none of Blick’s business where he lived.
“Then you know this district—these woods and hill-sides and downs—very well indeed, I should think,” continued Blick. “Out on them and amongst them early in a morning, and perhaps late at night, no doubt?”
Roper made no answer. He had got his pipe fairly going by that time, and he now picked up his ax and began to lop away the upper twigs and slighter branches of the tree on which Blick had seated himself. Blick assented to his silence and kept his own, the ax ceased, and Roper, leaning on its shaft, looked at his questioner.
“You ain’t come up here for nothing!” he said, with a scowl. “What might you be after? I do hear as how you’re a-enquiring into that there affair at Markenmore Hollow. I don’t know nothing about it. Might strike ’ee that if I did I’d ha’ come somewheres your way or to they police at Selcaster, and ha’ told.”
“And it might strike me that you wouldn’t,” retorted Blick, with a sly glance at his man. “I’ve learnt a good deal since I came into these parts. You’d a pretty good grudge against Guy Markenmore yourself, eh?”
“Don’t know nothing certain about how he come by his end, anyhow,” he muttered. “And as to grudges, there’s them around here as knows how that varmint treated I! Ain’t a decent man, same as what I’ve been, a right to have his feelings about another man as treated him bad?”
“You’ve the same right to your feelings that every other man has,” agreed Blick. “Who says you haven’t?”
“Well,” he remarked slowly, “’cause o’ such feelings as I do have, I ’oodn’t ha’ lifted a finger to presarve that man! He got what such-like desarves! But I ain’t no, what you might call certain idea whatever who he got it from.”