The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

"What in the world is the matter with you, Mr Gordon Butcher?" he said aloud to the howling wind. "Are you frightened or something? No, I'm not frightened. But I'll tell you straight. I'm not keen to handle this alone."

That was when he thought of Ford.

He thought of Ford at first because it was for him that he was working. He thought of him second because he knew that Ford was a kind of collector of old stuff, of all the old stones and arrowheads which people kept digging up from time to time in the district, which they brought to Ford and which Ford placed upon the mantel in his parlour. It was believed that Ford sold these things, but no one knew or cared how he did it.

Gordon Butcher turned towards Ford's place and walked fast out of the gate on to the narrow road, down the road around the sharp left-hand corner and so to the house. He found Ford in his large shed, bending over a damaged harrow, mending it. Butcher stood by the door and said, "Mr Ford!"

Ford looked around without straightening his body.

"Well, Gordon," he said, "what is it?"

Ford was middle-aged or a little older, bald-headed, long-nosed, with a clever foxy look about his face. His mouth was thin and sour, and when he looked at you, and when you saw the tightness of his mouth and the thin, sour line of his lips, you knew that this was a mouth that never smiled. His chin receded, his nose was long and sharp and he had the air about him of a sour old crafty fox from the woods.

"What is it?" he said looking up from the harrow.

Gordon Butcher stood by the door, blue-cheeked with cold, a little out of breath, rubbing his hands slowly one against the other.

"The tractor left the plough behind," he said quietly. "There's metal down there. I saw it."

Ford's head gave a jerk. "What kind of metal?" he said sharply.

"Flat. Quite flat like a sort of huge plate."

"You didn't dig it out?" Ford had straightened up now and there was a glint of eagles in his eyes.

Butcher said. "No, I left it alone and came straight on here."

Ford walked quickly over to the corner and took his coat off the nail. He found a cap and gloves, then he found a spade and went towards the door. There was something odd, he noticed, in Butcher's manner.

"You're sure it was metal?"

"Crusted up," Butcher said. "But it was metal all right."

"How deep?"

"Twelve inches down. At least the top of it was twelve inches down. The rest is deeper."

"How d'you know it was a plate?"

"I don't." Butcher said. "I only saw a little bit of the rim. But it looked like a plate to me. An enormous plate."

Ford's foxy face went quite white with excitement. "Come on," he said. "We'll go back and see."

The two men walked out of the shed into the fierce, ever-mounting fury of the wind. Ford shivered.

"Curse this filthy weather," he said. "Curse and blast this filthy freezing weather," and he sank his pointed foxy face deep into the collar of his coat and began to ponder upon the possibilities of Butcher's find.

One thing Ford knew which Butcher did not know. He knew that back in 1932 a man called Lethbridge, a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at Cambridge University, had been excavating in the district and that he had actually unearthed the foundations of a Roman villa on Thistley Green itself. Ford was not forgetting that, and he quickened his pace. Butcher walked beside him without speaking and soon they were there. They went through the gate and over the field to the plough which lay about ten yards behind the tractor.

Ford knelt down beside the front of the plough and peered into the small hole Gordon Butcher had dug with his hands. He touched the rim of green-blue metal with a gloved finger. He scraped away a bit more earth. He leaned further forward so that his pointed nose was right down the hole. He ran fingers over the rough green surface. Then he stood up and said, "Let's get the plough out of the way and do some digging." Although there were fireworks exploding in his head and shivers running all over his body, Ford kept his voice very soft and casual.

Between them they pulled the plough back a couple of yards.

"Give me the spade," Ford said, and he began cautiously to dig the soil away in a circle about three feet in diameter around the exposed patch of metal. When the hole was two feet deep, he threw away the spade and used his hands. He knelt down and scraped the soil away, and gradually the little patch of metal grew and grew until at last there lay exposed before them the great round disc of an enormous plate. It was fully twenty-four inches in diameter. The lower point of the plough had just caught the raised centre rim of the plate, for one could see the dent.

Carefully Ford lifted it out of the hole. He got to his feet, and stood wiping the soil away from it, turning it over and over in his hands. There was nothing much to see, for the whole surface was crusted over with a thick layer of a hard greenish-blue subs

tance. But he knew that it was an enormous plate or dish of great weight and thickness. It weighed about eighteen pounds!