Butcher brought the sack over and held it open while Ford carefully put the articles into it. They all went in except one. The massive two-foot plate was too large for the neck of the sack.
The two men were really cold now. For over an hour they had knelt and scratched about out there in the open field with the blizzard swirling around them. Already, nearly six inches of snow had fallen. Butcher was half-frozen. His cheeks were dead-white, blotched with blue, his feet were numb like wood, and when he moved his legs he could not feel the ground beneath his feet. He was much colder than Ford. His coat and clothes were not so thick, and ever since early morning he had been sitting high up on the seat of the tractor, exposed to the bitter wind. His blue-white face was tight and unmoving. All he wanted was to get home to his family and to the fire that he knew would be burning in the grate.
Ford, on the other hand, was not thinking about the cold. His mind was concentrated solely upon one thing -- how to get possession for himself of this fabulous treasure. His position, as he knew very well, was not a strong one.
In England there is a very curious law about finding any kind of gold or silver treasure. This law goes back hundreds of years, and is still strictly enforced today. The law states that if a person digs up out of the ground, even out of his own garden, a piece of metal that is either gold or silver, it automatically becomes what is known as Treasure Trove and is the property of the Crown. The Crown doesn't in these days mean the actual King or Queen. It means the country or the government. The law also states that it is a criminal offence to conceal such a find. You are simply not allowed to hide the stuff and keep it for yourself. You must report it at once, preferably to the police. And if you do report it at once, you as the finder will be entitled to receive from the government in money the full amount of the market value of the article. You are not required to report the digging up of other metals. You are allowed to find as much valuable pewter, bronze, copper or even platinum as you wish, and you can keep it all, but not gold or silver.
The other curious part of this curious law is this: it is the person who discovers the treasure in the first place who gets the reward from the government. The owner of the land gets nothing -- unless of course the finder is trespassing on the land when he makes the discovery. But if the finder of the treasure has been hired by the owner to do a job on his land, then he, the finder, gets all the reward.
In this case, the finder was Gordon Butcher. Furthermore, he was not trespassing. He was performing a job which he had been hired to do. This treasure therefore belonged to Butcher and to no one else. All he had to do was to take it and show it to an expert who would immediately identify it as silver, then turn it in to the police. In time, he would receive from the government one hundred per cent of its value -- perhaps a million pounds.
All this left Ford out in the cold and Ford knew it. He had no rights whatsoever to the treasure by law. Thus, as he must have told himself at the time, his only chance of getting hold of the stuff for himself lay in the fact that Butcher was an ignorant man who didn't know the law and who did not anyway have the faintest idea of the value of the find. The probability was that in a few days Butcher would forget all about it. He was too simple-minded a fellow, too artless, too trusting, to
o unselfish to give the matter much thought.
Now, out there in the desolate snowswept field, Ford bent down and took hold of the huge dish with one hand. He raised it but he did not lift it. The lower rim remained resting on the snow. With his other hand, he grasped the top of the sack. He didn't lift that either. He just held it. And there he stooped amid the swirling snowflakes, both hands embracing, as it were, the treasure, but not actually taking it. It was a subtle and a canny gesture. It managed somehow to signify ownership before ownership had been discussed. A child plays the same game when he reaches out and closes his fingers over the biggest chocolate eclair on the plate and then says, "Can I have this one, Mummy?" He's already got it.
"Well, Gordon," Ford said, stooping over, holding the sack and the great dish in his gloved fingers. "I don't suppose you want any of this old stuff."
It was not a question. It was a statement of fact framed as a question.
The blizzard was still raging. The snow was falling so densely the two men could hardly see one another.
"You ought to get along home and warm yourself up," Ford went on. "You look frozen to death."
"I feel frozen to death," Butcher said.
"Then you get on that tractor quick and hurry home," said the thoughtful, kind-hearted Ford. "Leave the plough here and leave your bike at my place. The important thing is to get back and warm yourself up before you catch pneumonia."
"I think that's just what I will do, Mr Ford," Butcher said. "Can you manage all right with that sack? It's mighty heavy."
"I might not even bother about it today," Ford said casually. "I just might leave it here and come back for it another time. Rusty old stuff."
"So long then, Mr Ford."
" 'Bye, Gordon."
Gordon Butcher mounted the tractor and drove away into the blizzard.
Ford hoisted the sack on to his shoulder, and then, not without difficulty, he lifted the massive dish with his other hand and tucked it under his arm.
"I am carrying," he told himself, as he trudged through the snow, "I am now carrying what is probably the biggest treasure ever dug up in the whole history of England."
When Gordon Butcher came stamping and blowing through the back door of his small brick house late that afternoon, his wife was ironing by the fire. She looked up and saw his blue-white face and snow-encrusted clothes.
"My goodness, Gordon, you look froze to death!" she cried.
"I am," he said. "Help me off with these clothes, love. My fingers aren't hardly working at all."
She took off his gloves, his coat, his jacket, his wet shirt. She pulled off his boots and socks. She fetched a towel and rubbed his chest and shoulders vigorously all over to restore the circulation. She rubbed his feet.
"Sit down there by the fire," she said, "and I'll get you a hot cup of tea."
Later, when he was settled comfortably in the warmth with dry clothes on his back and the mug of tea in his hand, he told her what had happened that afternoon.
"He's a foxy one, that Mr Ford," she said, not looking up from her ironing. "I never did like him."
"He got pretty excited about it all, I can tell you that," Gordon Butcher said. "Jumpy as a jack-rabbit he was."