"What is the meaning of this rudeness?" he sternly demanded.
"Oh, boss! don't you know? We are laughing at the beaks! They have blown themselves up in the old Haunted Chapel!" answered one of the party.
"Good Heaven! A wholesale murder! I was not prepared for that!" exclaimed the captain.
"A wholesale murder, or a wholesale accident, if you please, boss! but no murder. Nobody told them to take lights down into that vault, where there was gunpowder lying around loose! And if the trap was set for one meddler and caught a dozen, why, so much the better, I say! And I don't think it could a caught much less than a dozen, seeing as there were about fifteen or twenty men in the chapel when I spied it this afternoon from my cover in the woods on the mountain behind it, and I reckon there must a' been more than half of them killed."
"Hush!" said Satan; "don't you see that this lady is nearly fainting with terror?"
Sybil was indeed as white as a ghost, and on the very verge of swooning. But she managed to command nerve enough to ask:
"Was—can you tell me—was my husband in the chapel this afternoon?"
"Oh, no, ma'am!" answered the robber, who had immediately taken his cue from the glance of his captain's eye. "Oh, no, ma'am, I met him on his road to Blackville early this afternoon."
This was partly true, for the man had really seen Lyon Berners when he was walking along the river road to meet Joe. Sybil believed it to be wholly true, and uttered an exclamation of thankfulness.
The wine passed more freely, and the men grew merrier, wilder, and more uproarious. Sybil became very much alarmed; and not so much by the noisy orgies of these rude revellers, as by the dreadful gaze of Moloch fixed upon her from the opposite end of the table where he sat, and the offensive language of Satan's eyes whenever they turned towards her.