"Justice must be done first!" said Katerfelto with exceeding gravity. "Let me hear your own tale in your own words, and rely on my help."
Thus encouraged, the Parson embarked on a narrative of his brother's duel, but little exaggerated, nor indeed very different from the facts set forth above, interspersing his account with dire threats of vengeance and solemn oaths, whereat Waif's blood ran cold, that he would take no rest till he had discovered and hunted down the perpetrator of this murder, as he persisted in calling it, to the death!
Listening at the keyhole, she lost not a syllable of their conversation, and the gipsy-girl vowed in her heart to come between the avenger and his victim, aye, even though she must steep her hands in blood, and swing for it on Tyburn-tree.
Little by little Katerfelto gathered enough from Parson Gale's repetitions, threats, and assertions, to feel sure that his patient in the next room was the individual whom the visitor wished to identify and bring to justice. In his plotting brain such a complication was simply a problem to be solved, a sum to be worked out, a plot to be elaborated for his own advantage. With a gravity not lost on the West-country parson, who, for all his mother wit, felt overawed by the other's assumption of superior intelligence, he promised to furnish the information required, as soon as he should himself have consulted those spiritual intelligences he held at command.
"You shall come again when the moon is full," said he, accepting the broad pieces which his visitor thrust on him clumsily enough. "Ere then I shall discover his hiding-place, though he have taken refuge forty fathoms deep, below the sea. But, mark you—I am not a man of blood, and I make no promise to deliver him into your hand."
Again Waif's fingers stole to her knife, while the Parson's savage laugh grated on her ear.
"Show me where the deer is harboured," said he, passing into the street. "I can do all the rest myself. The Lord have mercy on him, for I will not, when once I set him up to bay!"