"Be paid the compliment of appearing in the Gazette as 'missing'? My word, that would be hard luck after such a business! Now, Tom?"
"More pie," said the latter deliberately. "Whilst we live we'll eat. But who can say what'll happen? We've given those poor fellows a regular drubbing; but I don't believe they've done with us. I don't like this drawing off, and the silence we now have; it means mischief. I'd give a heap to know what they are up to."
Once the meal was finished, and the horses' wants seen to, the defenders of the place occupied themselves in a hundred different ways. Some cleaned their carbines and burnished their scabbards; others indulged in the luxury of a wash at the pump in the yard; while Tom, on whom the responsibility of everything depended, walked slowly from one end to the other of the defences.
"I'd give a heap to be able to guess rightly what the enemy are up to," he said, for perhaps the tenth time, to Andrews, who seemed to haunt his side. "One sees little or nothing of them."
"Next to nothing, sir," agreed the rifleman, with knitted brows. "But they ain't up to no good, I'm sure of it. You can see 'em come from the village at times and stare over here at us. Then they'll disappear again, while boys and young men scuttle about, and carry armfuls of something that I ain't sure of at this distance. There's been knocking, too, in the church."
"Hum!" Tom pondered over the information. He listened acutely, for he was just at the edge of the platform above the church door. But from that position, indeed from any position held by the defenders, it was impossible to look into the place. Yes, there was knocking, coming from the interior of the church, and——
"I heard a heavy fall, as if stones had been dislodged!" he exclaimed. "Come down below with me, Andrews."
They ran to the stairs, and scuttled down at their fastest pace. Making their way along the corridor they were soon at the kitchen, and then entered a storeroom beyond. It had been ransacked by Howeley and his helpers, and had provided an ample supply of good things. But it was not the contents of the room that interested Tom; it was the wall, the party wall, on the far side of which was the church.
"Listen," he said. "There!"
A glance at the rifleman's face was sufficient to show that he, too, had gathered the full meaning of those blows.