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don’t have a pumpkin. Would you settle for a squash?”
    “A squash wouldn’t be fair. They have awfully tough skins.”
    “So did old man Architrave. Besides, he was wearing his overcoat and I don’t know what all underneath. A cardigan and a heavy shirt and a winter undershirt at least, wouldn’t you think?
    I’m telling you, Hazel, it wouldn’t work. Your hand would simply slide down the shaft. You’d have to take a hammer and pound the arrow in, and who’s going to stand still for that?”
    “I’ll bet your hand wouldn’t slip if you grabbed the arrow around the feathers.”
    “You’d mash the feathers all to heck, though, and these were standing up stiff and straight as you please. Gray ones. Do you think I wouldn’t have noticed? Besides, what about that arrow that hit the ash tree? It was sticking in at least three inches, and I defy anybody to throw an arrow that far and make it stick. Actually, those were two remarkably good shots for anybody to make by accident, even with a heavy bow.”
    “All right, Dittany, I grant you the bow.” Hazel nibbled thoughtfully at a sweet meal biscuit. “So if it wasn’t an accident, what was the sense of shooting at the backhoe man? This Frankland was doing the perk tests he wanted, wasn’t he?”
    “He who?”
    “McNaster, of course, if he’s after the land.”
    “But so was Architrave. I mean, Mr. Architrave was the one who told Frankland to do them, so he had to be on McNaster’s side, didn’t he? Hazel, I’d adore to pin a deliberate murder on that scaly scaledrell. I mean scouny-oh, heck! That scurvy scur.
    Anyway, I wish we could, but I don’t see how. Besides, McNaster’s arrows have red and yellow stripes with purple feathers as you might expect from somebody who’s got a taste like a can of worms. This was a single inch-wide stripe of solid black.”
    “Nobody has an inch-wide stripe of solid black.”
    “Everybody knows that. That’s why they’re talking about a hunter from the States.”
    “Then I daresay they’re right and this is just one of those awful coincidences,” sighed Hazel. “It’s a mercy poor old John didn’t wind up stuffed and mounted on somebody’s mantelpiece.
    But I still say McNaster’s morally responsible, for having got him up there in the first place. That is, assuming we’re right in what we’re assuming,” she added, for Hazel was a stickler about not bearing false witness against her neighbor. “And I honestly don’t see how we can be wrong. Do you?”

CHAPTER 4
    Hazel hauled herself out of the rocker and began fiddling with her coat buttons. “By the way, you haven’t said much about this Frankland chap. What’s he like?”
    “On the tall and burly side. Thirtyish, I should think. I’m never any good at ages.”
    “Nice-looking?”
    “Not bad. He must have a first-rate dentist.” Dittany could have been charitable enough to say something agreeable about his smile instead, but she knew what Hazel was driving at: namely that a single young woman with a big house to keep up must automatically view every new man who came along as potential husband material and was he or wasn’t he?
    “I’ll bet you a nickel that’s Minerva Oakes’s new boarder,”
    Hazel mused. “She was saying at the club that she has a perfectly darling fellow staying there now.”
    “I know it is because Mrs. Mac Vicar said so, and all Minerva’s boarders are perfect darlings till proven otherwise. Her last perfect darling stole her autographed photo of John Diefenbaker, don’t ask me why.”
    “Probably because it wasn’t a picture of Pierre Trudeau instead,”
    sniffed Hazel, a Tory to the bone. “Are you sure Frankland wasn’t simply digging in the wrong place?”
    “Of course I’m sure. He had a plot plan with Hunneker Land Grant printed right on it and a bunch of dots in red ink marking the places where he was supposed to do his tests. And furthermore, any woman who can even think of Pierre Trudeau without