r his pleasure, may stay away
for mine. I have been pestered with this lot too long, and only bore with
him for poor sister Martha's sake; but 'tis after his father that the
graceless lad takes, and thus rewards me.'

With that she bangs the door in the parson's face and off he goes to
Ratsey, but can learn nothing there, and so concludes that I have run
away to sea, and am seeking ship at Poole or Weymouth.

But that same day came Sam Tewkesbury to the Why Not? about nightfall,
and begged a glass of rum, being, as he said, 'all of a shake', and
telling a tale of how he passed the churchyard wall on his return from
work, and in the dusk heard screams and wailing voices, and knew 'twas
Blackbeard piping his lost Mohunes to hunt for treasure. So, though he
saw nothing, he turned tail and never stopped running till he stood at
the inn door. Then, forthwith, Elzevir leaves Sam to drink at the Why
Not? alone, and himself sets off running up the street to call for Master
Ratsey; and they two make straight across the sea-meadows in the dark.

'For as soon as I heard Tewkesbury tell of screams and wailings in the
air, and no one to be seen,' said Elzevir, 'I guessed that some poor soul
had got shut in the vault, and was there crying for his life. And to this
I was not guided by mother wit, but by a surer and a sadder token. Thou
wilt have heard how thirteen years ago a daft body we called Cracky Jones
was found one morning in the churchyard dead. He was gone missing for a
week before, and twice within that week I had sat through the night upon
the hill behind the church, watching to warn the lugger with a flare she
could not put in for the surf upon the beach. And on those nights, the
air being still though a heavy swell was running, I heard thrice or more
a throttled scream come shivering across the meadows from the graveyard.
Yet beyond turning my blood cold for a moment, it gave me little trouble,
for evil tales have hung about the church; and though I did not set much
store by the old yarns of Blackbeard piping up his crew, yet I thought
strange things might well go on among the graves at night. And so I never
budged, nor stirred hand or foot to save a fellow-creature in his agony.

'But when the surf fell enough for the boats to get ashore, and Greening
held a lantern for me to jump down into the passage, after we had got the
side out of the tomb, the first thing the light fell on at the bottom
was a white face turned sk