his outstretched
hands against a tombstone. He rose instantly and fled again. Stumbling
again, he struck his head against the wall of the church. Dizzy and
bewildered, he hastened on, driven forward by the terror of hearing some
death noise from the vault. Tripping, staggering, rushing blindly, he
reached the stile at last, and stood beyond it on the road. Before him
was Moylin's house. The window was lighted up, the door was open. He saw
men seated within, and heard them laugh aloud. They seemed to him not
men, but fiends making merry over murder, and the winning for their hell
of a new damned soul. He fled from them as he had fled from the sound
he dreaded. He rushed down the steep lane. Loose stones rolled under his
feet. Sparks started into sudden brightness where the nails in his boot
soles struck flints. The hedges rose high on each side of him, making
the lane, even in the pale June night, intolerably dark. He fled on,
blind, reckless, for the moment mad.

Suddenly he was stopped short. Strong arms were round him. He was flung
to the ground. A man knelt on his chest. Rough hands grasped his throat.

"Who have you there, Tarn?"

"A damned fool for certain, whoever he is. What brings him down a hill
like this in the dark, as if the devil was after him?"

"Loose his throat; do you want to choke him. Let him speak. Now, then,
man, tell us who you are, and what you're doing here."

Neal's powers of reasoning and thought returned to him. With the
presence of real danger his fear vanished. He saw the forms of the men
above him, discerned against the dull grey of the sky that they were
armed and in uniform. He understood at once that he had fallen into the
hands of soldiers, perhaps of yeomen.

"Who are you?" said the voice again.

Then the man who knelt on him added a word of warning--

"If you won't speak, we're the boys who know how to loose your tongue.
We've made many a damned croppy glad to speak when we'd dealt with him."

Neal remained silent.

"Get him on his feet, Tam, and we'll take him to the Captain. If he's
not a rebel himself he'll know where the rebels are hid."

Neal was pulled up by the arms and marched along the lane again to
Moylin's house. He was led into the kitchen. Two men sat at the table
drinking. They were in uniform. Neal recognised it as that of the
Kilulta yeomen, the men who had raided his father's meeting-house. He
recognised one of the officers--Captain Twinely. The sergeant