Choosing a moment when the backs of the two smugglers were turned, Mother Tibbs darted out from behind the sycamore, and shot back into the chapel, evidently afraid of not being found at her post. And she was shortly followed by Endymion Leer and his companion.
At first, the sensations of Master Nathaniel and Master Ambrose were too complicated to be expressed in words, and they merely stared at each other, with round eyes. Then a slow smile broke over Master Nathaniel's face, "No Moongrass cheese for you this time, Brosie," he said. "Who was right, you or me?"
"By the Milky Way, it was you, Nat!" cried Master Ambrose, for once, in a voice of real excitement. "The rascal! The unmitigated rogue! So it's him, is it, we parents have to thank for what has happened! But he'll hang for it, he'll hang for it—though we have to change the whole constitution of Dorimare! The blackguard!"
"Into the town probably as a hearse," Master Nathaniel was saying thoughtfully, "then buried here, then down through my chapel into the secret room in the Guildhall, whence, I suppose, they distribute it by degrees. It's quite clear now how the stuff gets into Lud. All that remains to clear up is how it gets past our Yeomen on the border ... but what's taken you, Ambrose?"
For Master Ambrose was simply shaking with laughter; and he did not laugh easily.
"Do the dead bleed?" he was repeating between his guffaws; "why, Nat, it's the best joke I've heard these twenty years!"
And when he had sufficiently recovered he told Master Nathaniel about the red juice oozing out of the coffin, which he had taken for blood, and how he had frightened Endymion Leer out of his wits by asking him about it.
"When, of course, it was a bogus funeral, and what I had seen was the juice of that damned fruit!" and again he was seized with paroxysms of laughter.
But Master Nathaniel merely gave an absent smile; there was something vaguely reminiscent in that idea of the dead bleeding—something he had recently read or heard; but, for the moment, he could not remember where.
In the meantime, Master Ambrose had recovered his gravity. "Come, come," he cried briskly, "we've not a moment to lose. We must be off at once to Mumchance, rouse him and a couple of his men, and be back in a twinkling to that tapestry-room, to take them red-handed."