atchet, and go up and break open that coffin."

"What do you mean?" demanded the London officer.

"I mean," answered the little priest, and his voice seemed to rise
slightly in the roar of the gale. "I mean that the great devil of the
universe may be sitting on the top tower of this castle at this moment,
as big as a hundred elephants, and roaring like the Apocalypse. There is
black magic somewhere at the bottom of this."

"Black magic," repeated Flambeau in a low voice, for he was too
enlightened a man not to know of such things; "but what can these other
things mean?"

"Oh, something damnable, I suppose," replied Brown impatiently. "How
should I know? How can I guess all their mazes down below? Perhaps you
can make a torture out of snuff and bamboo. Perhaps lunatics lust after
wax and steel filings. Perhaps there is a maddening drug made of lead
pencils! Our shortest cut to the mystery is up the hill to the grave."

His comrades hardly knew that they had obeyed and followed him till a
blast of the night wind nearly flung them on their faces in the garden.
Nevertheless they had obeyed him like automata; for Craven found
a hatchet in his hand, and the warrant in his pocket; Flambeau was
carrying the heavy spade of the strange gardener; Father Brown was
carrying the little gilt book from which had been torn the name of God.

The path up the hill to the churchyard was crooked but short; only under
that stress of wind it seemed laborious and long. Far as the eye could
see, farther and farther as they mounted the slope, were seas beyond
seas of pines, now all aslope one way under the wind. And that universal
gesture seemed as vain as it was vast, as vain as if that wind were
whistling about some unpeopled and purposeless planet. Through all that
infinite growth of grey-blue forests sang, shrill and high, that ancient
sorrow that is in the heart of all heathen things. One could fancy that
the voices from the under world of unfathomable foliage were cries of
the lost and wandering pagan gods: gods who had gone roaming in that
irrational forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.

"You see," said Father Brown in low but easy tone, "Scotch people before
Scotland existed were a curious lot. In fact, they're a curious lot
still. But in the prehistoric times I fancy they really worshipped
demons. That," he added genially, "is why they jumped at the Puritan
theology."

"My friend," said Flambeau, turning in a