y!" "He wor a rare fine chap!" "We'll all miss him!" eagerly
answered the chorus.

With a curious gesture, half of grief, half of defiance, the drayman
tore a scrap of black lining from his coat, and tied it to his whip.

"Tom was pretty well known to be a terror to some folk,--specially liars
an' raskills,"--he said--"An' I aint excusin' murder. But all the same
I'm in mourning for Tom an' 'is little Kiddie, an' I don't care who
knows it!"

He went off, and the group dispersed, partly driven asunder by the
increasing fury of the wind, which was now sweeping through the streets
in strong, steady gusts, hurling everything before it. But Helmsley set
his face to the storm and toiled on. He must get out of Minehead. This
he felt to be imperative. He could not stay in a town which now for many
days would talk of nothing else but the tragic death of Tom o' the
Gleam. His nerves were shaken, and he felt himself to be mentally, as
well as physically, distressed by the strange chance which had
associated him against his will with such a grim drama of passion and
revenge. He remembered seeing the fateful motor swing down that
precipitous road near Cleeve,--he recalled its narrow escape from a
complete upset at the end of the declivity when it had swerved round the
corner and rushed on,--how little he had dreamed that a child's life had
just been torn away by its reckless wheels!--and that child the
all-in-the-world to Tom o' the Gleam! Tom must have tracked the motor by
following some side-lane or short cut known only to himself, otherwise
Helmsley thought he would hardly have escaped seeing him. But, in any
case, the slow and trudging movements of an old man must have lagged
far, far behind those of the strong, fleet-footed gypsy to whom the
wildest hills and dales, cliffs and sea caves were all familiar ground.
Like a voice from the grave, the reply Tom had given to Matt Peke at the
"Trusty Man," when Matt asked him where he had come from, rang back upon
his ears--"From the caves of Cornwall! From picking up drift on the
shore and tracking seals to their lair in the hollows of the rocks! All
sport, Matt! I live like a gentleman born, keeping or killing at my
pleasure!"

Shuddering at this recollection, Helmsley pressed on in the teeth of the
blast, and a sudden shower of rain scudded by, stinging him in the face
with the sharpness of needlepoints. The gale was so high, and the blown
dust so thick on all sides, that he coul