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By the body stood Botley, the game-keeper, scratching his head. It was now very evident what had occurred. The three miscreants who had tried to torture me had endeavoured to escape by letting themselves down by a rope from the top of the tower. Two had succeeded and one had been killed.
On his walk home Karr was too unhappy for words! He could not understand why Grayskin should allow that wretch of a water-snake to trick him away. He had never heard of such folly! "What power can that old Helpless have?" As Karr walked along, his mind full of these thoughts, he happened to see the game-keeper, who stood pointing up at a tree.
Stone being discharged from his situation, offered to hire himself as my game-keeper, and to divulge the whole plot, and appear as a witness against his former employers.
His game-keeper was waiting at the boathouse, but the postman had brought some letters that made him put off his sport. This was annoying, because Osborn hated to be balked and seldom allowed anything to interfere with his amusements. One letter, from a housemaster at a famous public school, covered a number of bills, which, the writer stated somewhat curtly, ought to have been paid.
"This is another Brutum Fulinen launched at the Critical Review by one Churchill, who it seems is a clergyman, and it must be owned has a knack at versification; a bard, who upon the strength of having written a few good lines in a thing called The Rosciad, swaggers about as if he were game-keeper of Parnassus."
It wasn't the girl, after all," said the game-keeper. "Never did seem to me as if it could be, anyhow. Here's the lad that did it all and I caught him in the act. The feathers are all over him still." "It wasn't me! She did it! I saw her, and I took the feathers from her," wailed Jake, anxious, as ever, to escape himself, no matter how many lies he had to tell, or who had to suffer for his sins.
Out of the door of the house there stepped a tall, flaxen-haired man, such a figure as one would choose for the flank of a Grenadier company. As he turned his brown face and his blue eyes toward us I recognised Lord Dacre. With long strides he came down the gravel path straight for the spot where we lay. "Come out, Ned!" he shouted; "you'll have the game-keeper putting a charge of shot into you.
We've kept them under the strictest preservation for the last four years; every game-keeper and village gun loafer for twenty miles round has been warned and bribed and threatened to respect their sanctity, and egg-snatching agents have been carefully guarded against during the breeding season.
A burst of popularity followed; his books, The Game-Keeper at Home, Wild Life in a Southern Country, The Amateur Poacher, Round about a Great Estate, etc., none of which had been printed in large numbers, were sold at four or five times their published price; and, worst of all, cheap imitations of his style began to flood the newspapers.
These statements if true would seem to cast an unpleasant sidelight upon the character of my acquaintance of the Abbey Inn. And I wondered if Martin's mysterious references to certain patrons, whose patronage had damaged his business, might not have referred to the game-keeper.
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