And
his reply really amounted to 'No, I don't.' But I have never heard it
better put."
It was, I suppose, at about this time when the people were puzzling
their heads as to the secret methods used by the Germans or their
agents to accomplish their crimes that a very singular circumstance
became known to a few of the Porth people. It related to the murder of
the Williams family on the Highway in front of their cottage door. I do
not know that I have made it plain that the old Roman road called the
Highway follows the course of a long, steep hill that goes steadily
westward till it slants down and droops towards the sea. On either side
of the road the ground falls away, here into deep shadowy woods, here
to high pastures, now and again into a field of corn, but for the most
part into the wild and broken land that is characteristic of Arfon.
The fields are long and narrow, stretching up the steep hillside;
they fall into sudden dips and hollows, a well springs up in the midst
of one and a grove of ash and thorn bends over it, shading it; and
beneath it the ground is thick with reeds and rushes. And then may come
on either side of such a field territories glistening with the deep
growth of bracken, and rough with gorse and rugged with thickets of
blackthorn, green lichen hanging strangely from the branches; such are
the lands on either side of the Highway.
Now on the lower slopes of it, beneath the Williams's cottage, some
three or four fields down the hill, there is a military camp. The place
has been used as a camp for many years, and lately the site has been
extended and huts have been erected. But a considerable number of the
men were under canvas here in the summer of 1915.
On the night of the Highway murder this camp, as it appeared
afterwards, was the scene of the extraordinary panic of the horses.
A good many men in the camp were asleep in their tents soon after
9.30, when the last post was sounded. They woke up in panic. There was
a thundering sound on the steep hillside above them, and down upon the
tents came half a dozen horses, mad with fright, trampling the canvas,
trampling the men, bruising dozens of them and killing two.
Everything was in wild confusion, men groaning and screaming in the
darkness, struggling with the canvas and the twisted ropes, shouting
out, some them, raw lads enough, that the Germans had landed, others
wiping the blood from their eyes, a few, roused suddenly from heavy
sleep, hitting out at one another, officers coming up at the double
roaring out orders to the sergeants, a party of soldiers who were just
returning to camp from the village seized with fright at what they
could scarcely see or distinguish, at the wildness of the shouting and
cursing and groaning that they could not understand, bolting out of the
camp again and racing for their lives back to the village: everything
in the maddest confusion of wild disorder.
Some of the men had seen the horses galloping down the hill as if
terror itself was driving them. They scattered off into the darkness,
and somehow or another found their way back in the night to their
pasture above the camp. They were grazing there peacefully in the
morning, and the only sign of the panic of the night before was the mud
they had scattered all over themselves as they pelted through a patch
of wet ground. The farrier said they were as quiet a lot as any in
Meirion; he could make nothing of it.
"Indeed," he said, "I believe they must have seen the devil himself
to be in such a fright as that: save the people!"
Now all this was kept as quiet as might be at the time when it
happened; it became known to the men of the Porth Club in the days when
they were discussing the difficult question of the German outrages, as
the murders were commonly called. And this wild stampede of the farm
horses was held by some to be evidence of the extraordinary and
unheard-of character of the dreadful agency that was at work. One of
the members of the club had been told by an officer who was in the camp
at the time of the panic that the horses that came charging down were
in a perfect fury of fright, that he had never seen horses in such a
state, and so there was endless speculation as to the nature of the
sight or the sound that had driven half a dozen quiet beasts into
raging madness.
Then, in the middle of this talk, two or three other incidents,
quite as odd and incomprehensible, came to be known, borne on chance
trickles of gossip that came into the towns from outland farms, or were
carried by cottagers tramping into Porth on market-day with a fowl or
two and eggs and garden stuff; scraps and fragments of talk gathered by
servants from the country folk and repeated to their mistresses. And in
such ways it came out that up at Plase Newydd there had been a terrible
business over swarming the bees; they had turned as wild as wasps and
much more savage. They had come about the people who were taking the
swarms like a cloud. They settled on one man's face so that you could
not see the flesh for the bees crawling all over it, and they had stung
him so badly that the doctor did not know whether he would get over it,
and they had chased a girl who had come out to see the swarming, and
settled on her and stung her to death. Then they had gone off to a
brake below the farm and got into a hollow tree there, and it was not
safe to go near it, for they would come out at you by day or by
night.
And much the same thing had happened, it seemed, at three or four
farms and cottages where bees were kept. And there were stories, hardly
so clear or so credible, of sheepdogs, mild and trusted beasts,
turning as savage as wolves and injuring the farm boys in a horrible
manner—in one case it was said with fatal results. It was
certainly true that old Mrs. Owen's favourite Brahma-Dorking cock had
gone mad; she came into Porth one Saturday morning with her face and
her neck all bound up and plastered. She had gone out to her bit of a
field to feed the poultry the night before, and the bird had flown at
her and attacked her most savagely, inflicting some very nasty wounds
before she could beat it off.
"There was a stake handy, lucky for me," she said, "and I did beat
him and beat him till the life was out of him. But what is come to the
world, whatever?"
Now Remnant, the man of theories, was also a man of extreme leisure.
It was understood that he had succeeded to ample means when he was
quite a young man, and after tasting the savours of the law, as it
were, for half a dozen terms at the board of the Middle Temple, he had
decided that it would be senseless to bother himself with passing
examinations for a profession which he had not the faintest intention
of practising. So he turned a deaf ear to the call of "Manger" ringing
through the Temple Courts, and set himself out to potter amiably
through the world. He had pottered all over Europe, he had looked at
Africa, and had even put his head in at the door of the East, on a trip
which included the Greek isles and Constantinople. Now, getting into
the middle fifties, he had settled at Porth for the sake, as he said,
of the Gulf Stream and the fuchsia hedges, and pottered over his books
and his theories and the local gossip. He was no more brutal than the
general public, which revels in the details of mysterious crime: but it
must be said that the terror, black though it was, was a boon to him.
He peered and investigated and poked about with the relish of a man to
whose life a new zest has been added. He listened attentively to the
strange tales of bees and dogs and poultry that came into Porth with
the country baskets of butter, rabbits, and green peas; and he evolved
at last a most extraordinary theory.
Full of this discovery, as he thought it, he went one night to see
Dr. Lewis and take his view of the matter.
"I want to talk to you," said Remnant to the doctor, "about what I
have called, provisionally, the Z Ray."
Dr.
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