He raised the index-finger of his right hand, pointed it at the company, shook it authoritatively as he spoke, as if to call ocular attention also to his words.

"Ef Abel Edwards did make 'way with himself any other way than by jumping into the Dead Hole, _what_ did he do with his remains?
He couldn't bury himself nohow." Simon Basset chuckled dryly and looked at the others with conclusive triumph.

His face was full of converging lines of nose and chin and brows, which seemed to bring it to a general point of craft and astuteness.

Even his grizzled hair slanted forward in a stiff cowlick over his forehead, and his face bristled sharply with his gray beard.
Simon Basset was the largest land-owner in the village, and the dust and loam of his own acres seemed to have formed a gray grime over all his awkward homespun garb.

Never a woman he met but looked apprehensively at his great, clomping, mud-clogged boots.
It was believed by many that Simon Basset never removed a suit of clothes, after he had once put it on, until it literally dropped from him in rags.