“Go on,” said the priest very gently. “We are only trying to find the truth. What are you afraid of?”
“I am afraid of finding it,” said Flambeau.
The London detective spoke suddenly in a high crowing voice that was meant to be conversational and cheery. “I wonder why he really did hide himself like that. Something nasty, I suppose; was he a leper?”
“Something worse than that,” said Flambeau.
“And what do you imagine,” asked the other, “would be worse than a leper?”
“I don’t imagine it,” said Flambeau.
He dug for some dreadful minutes in silence, and then said in a choked voice, “I’m afraid of his not being the right shape.”
“Nor was that piece of paper, you know,” said Father Brown quietly, “and we survived even that piece of paper.”
Flambeau dug on with a blind energy. But the tempest had shouldered away the choking grey clouds that clung to the hills like smoke and revealed grey fields of faint starlight before he cleared the shape of a rude timber coffin, and somehow tipped it up upon the turf. Craven stepped forward with his axe; a thistle-top touched him, and he flinched. Then he took a firmer stride, and hacked and wrenched with an energy like Flambeau’s till the lid was torn off, and all that was there lay glimmering in the grey starlight.
“Bones,” said Craven; and then he added, “but it is a man,” as if that were something unexpected.
“Is he,” asked Flambeau in a voice that went oddly up and down, “is he all right?”