"Is it likely," said the youth, "that I would strike an aged man like that? I a.s.sure you I never had such a fright in my life. This poor old fellow came on me quite suddenly, from behind a rock, when all my mind was full of my father; and his eyes met mine, and down he fell, as if I had shot him through the heart!"
"You have done no less," I answered; and then I stooped over the corpse (as I had stooped over the corpse of its victim), and the whole of my strength was required to draw the great knotted hands from the eyes, upon which they were cramped with a spasm not yet relaxed.
"It is Hopkin ap Howel!" I cried, as the great eyes, glaring with the horror of death, stood forth. "Black Hopkin once, white Hopkin now!
Robert Bowring, you have slain the man who slew your father."
"You know that I never meant to do it," said Bob. "Surely, uncle, it was his own fault!"
"How did he come? I see no way. He was not here when I showed you the place, or else we must have seen him."
"He came round the corner of that rock, that stands in front of the furze-bush."
Now that we had the clue, a little examination showed the track. Behind the furze-bush, a natural tunnel of rock, not more than a few yards long, led into a narrow gorge covered with brushwood, and winding into the valley below the farmhouse of the Dewless Crags. Thither we hurried to obtain a.s.sistance, and there the whole mystery was explained.
Black Hopkin (who stole behind George Bowring and stunned, or, perhaps, slew him with one vile blow) has this and this only to say at the Bar--that he did it through love of his daughter.
Gwenthlian, the last of seven, lay dying on the day when my friend and myself came up the valley of the Aydyr. Her father, a man of enormous power of will and pa.s.sion, as well as muscle, rushed forth of the house like a madman, when the doctor from Dolgelly told him that nothing more remained except to await the good time of heaven. It was the same deadly decline which had slain every one of his children at that same age, and now must extinguish a long descended and slowly impoverished family.
"If I had but a gold watch I could save her!" he cried in his agony, as he left the house. "Ever since the old gold watch was sold, they have died--they have died! They are gone, one after one, the last of all my children!"
In these lonely valleys lurks a strange old superst.i.tion that even Death must listen to the voice of Time in gold; that, when the scanty numbered moments of the sick are fleeting, a gold watch laid in the wasted palm, and pointing the earthly hours, compels the scythe of Death to pause, the timeless power to bow before the two great G.o.ds of the human race--time and gold.
Poor George in the valley must have shown his watch. The despairing father must have been struck with crafty madness at the sight. The watch was placed in his daughter"s palm; but Death had no regard for it. Thenceforth Black Hopkin was a blasted man, racked with remorse and heart-disease, sometimes raving, always roving, but finding no place of repentance. And it must have been a happy stroke--if he had made his peace above, which none of us can deal with--when the throb of his long-worn heart stood still at the vision of his victim, and his soul took flight to realms that have no gold and no chronometer.