We must find the jineral public afore we can demand that,' said his
lieutenant.

'Well, well, we shall do better without 'em,' said Latimer, who changed
his moods at a moment's notice. 'But there's great cause of suspicion in
this silence and this keeping out of sight, and I'll bear it in mind. Now
we will go across to Owlett's orchard, and see what we can find there.'

Stockdale, who heard this discussion from the garden-gate, over which he
had been leaning, was rather alarmed, and thought it a mistake of the
villagers to keep so completely out of the way. He himself, like the
excisemen, had been wondering for the last half-hour what could have
become of them. Some labourers were of necessity engaged in distant
fields, but the master-workmen should have been at home; though one and
all, after just showing themselves at their shops, had apparently gone
off for the day. He went in to Lizzy, who sat at a back window sewing,
and said, 'Lizzy, where are the men?'

Lizzy laughed. 'Where they mostly are when they're run so hard as this.'
She cast her eyes to heaven. 'Up there,' she said.

Stockdale looked up. 'What--on the top of the church tower?' he asked,
seeing the direction of her glance.

'Yes.'

'Well, I expect they will soon have to come down,' said he gravely. 'I
have been listening to the officers, and they are going to search the
orchard over again, and then every nook in the church.'

Lizzy looked alarmed for the first time. 'Will you go and tell our
folk?' she said. 'They ought to be let know.' Seeing his conscience
struggling within him like a boiling pot, she added, 'No, never mind,
I'll go myself.'

She went out, descended the garden, and climbed over the churchyard wall
at the same time that the preventive-men were ascending the road to the
orchard. Stockdale could do no less than follow her. By the time that
she reached the tower entrance he was at her side, and they entered
together.

Nether-Moynton church-tower was, as in many villages, without a turret,
and the only way to the top was by going up to the singers' gallery, and
thence ascending by a ladder to a square trap-door in the floor of the
bell-loft, above which a permanent ladder was fixed, passing through the
bells to a hole in the roof. When Lizzy and Stockdale reached the
gallery and looked up, nothing but the trap-door and the five holes for
the bell-ropes appeared. The ladder was gone.

'There's no getting up,' said