Two gentlemen in very good hats came over the wall at half past two with a shovel apiece and an arrangement already struck with a medical college that pays by the specimen and asks nothing further.
Their information was excellent. Fresh interment, soft ground, no watchman since the parish stopped funding one. What their information did not cover, because no ledger in the county records such a thing, is that the occupant had spent eleven months down there with nothing whatsoever to occupy him but the growing conviction that a coffin is only a chassis somebody gave up on.
The lid came off from underneath. The blower lit. The lanterns swung wild.
They are still running after it — hats gone, shovels abandoned in the wet grass, hollering at a hole in the ground that has gone and stolen itself.
