“And what do you here, fools?” said a voice, abruptly. The spectators turned: a new comer had been added to the throng,—it was Richard Houseman. His dress loose and disarranged, his flushed cheeks and rolling eyes, betrayed the source of consolation to which he had flown from his domestic affliction. “What do ye here?” said he, reeling forward. “Ha! human bones? And whose may they be, think ye?”
“They are Clarke’s!” said the woman, who had first given rise to that supposition.
“Yes, we think they are Daniel Clarke’s,—he who disappeared some years ago!” cried two or three voices in concert. “Clarke’s?” repeated Houseman, stooping down and picking up a thigh-bone, which lay at a little distance from the rest; “Clarke’s? Ha! ha! they are no more Clarke’s than mine!”
“Behold!” shouted Walter, in a voice that rang from cliff to plain; and springing forward, he seized Houseman with a giant’s grasp,—“behold the murderer!”
As if the avenging voice of Heaven had spoken, a thrilling, an electric conviction darted through the crowd. Each of the elder spectators remembered at once the person of Houseman, and the suspicion that had attached to his name.
“Seize him! seize him!” burst forth from twenty voices. “Houseman is the murderer!”
“Murderer!” faltered Houseman, trembling in the iron hands of Walter,—“murderer of whom? I tell ye these are not Clarke’s bones!”
“Where then do they lie?” cried his arrester.
Pale, confused, conscience-stricken, the bewilderment of intoxication mingling with that of fear, Houseman turned a ghastly look around him, and, shrinking from the eyes of all, reading in the eyes of all his condemnation, he gasped out, “Search St. Robert’s Cave, in the turn at the entrance!”
“Away!” rang the deep voice of Walter, on the instant; “away! To the cave, to the cave!”