Directly the grocer had gone, Hardacre started to dig a pit a few yards from the poultry sheds. He had intended it to be a deep one, but the unaccustomed digging soon began to tire him and it ended in the pit being quite a shallow one, not much more than two feet down.
Then he ruthlessly set about wringing the necks of every bird he had and tossing the carcasses anyhow into the pit. He cursed many times there were so many of them to kill, but with no feelings of compunction that he was destroying valuable birds, quite a number of which had cost him five guineas a head.
The slaughter over and having jumped on the birds to make them lie flat, he threw back the earth on top of them, confident that in a few weeks at most the weeds would be hiding all traces of their interment.
Next, in the
