"The way I look at it is this," said Simon Basset one night in the
village store. He raised the index-finger of his right hand, pointed
it at the company, shook it authoritatively as he spoke, as if to
call ocular attention also to his words. "Ef Abel Edwards did make
'way with himself any other way than by jumping into the Dead Hole,
_what_ did he do with his remains? He couldn't bury himself nohow."
Simon Basset chuckled dryly and looked at the others with conclusive
triumph. His face was full of converging lines of nose and chin and
brows, which seemed to bring it to a general point of craft and
astuteness. Even his grizzled hair slanted forward in a stiff cowlick
over his forehead, and his face bristled sharply with his gray beard.
Simon Basset was the largest land-owner in the village, and the dust
and loam of his own acres seemed to have formed a gray grime over all
his awkward homespun garb. Never a woman he met but looked
apprehensively at his great, clomping, mud-clogged boots.

It was believed by many that Simon Basset never removed a suit of
clothes, after he had once put it on, until it literally dropped from
him in rags. He was also said to have argued, when taken to task for
this most untidy custom, that birds and animals never shifted their
coats until they were worn out, and it behooved men to follow their
innocent and natural habits as closely as possible.

Simon Basset, sitting in an old leather-cushioned arm-chair in the
midst of the lounging throng, waited for applause after his
conclusive opinion upon Abel Edwards's disappearance; but there were
only affirmative grunts from a few. Many had their own views.

"I ain't noways clear in my mind that Abel did kill himself," said a
tall man, with a great length of thin, pale whiskers falling over his