Here her voice broke, and she sank on a seat half swooning, while Elizabeth, her eldest girl, finished the story in low, trembling tones. Tom o' the Gleam meanwhile stood rigidly upright and silent. To him the chief officer of the law finally turned.
"Will you come with us quietly?" he asked, "or do you mean to give us trouble?"
Tom lifted his dark eyes.
"I shall give no man any more trouble," he answered. "I shall go nowhere save where I am taken. You need fear nothing from me now. But I must speak."
The officer frowned warningly.
"You'd better not!" he said.
"I must!" repeated Tom. "You think,—all of you,—that I had no cause—no provocation—to kill the man who lies there"—and he turned a fierce glance upon the covered corpse, from which a dark stream of blood was trickling slowly along the floor—"I swear before God that I had cause!—and that my cause was just! I had provocation!—the bitterest and worst! That man was a murderer as surely as I am. Look yonder!" And lifting his manacled hands he extended them towards the bench where lay the bundle covered with horse-cloth, which he had carried in his arms and set down when he had first entered the inn. "Look, I say!—and then tell me I had no cause!"
With an uneasy glance one of the officers went up to the spot indicated, and hurriedly, yet fearfully, lifted the horse-cloth and looked under it. Then uttering an exclamation of horror and pity, he drew away the covering altogether, and disclosed to view the dead body of a child,—a little curly-headed lad,—lying as if it were asleep, a smile on its pretty mouth, and a bunch of wild thyme clasped in the clenched fingers of its small right hand.
"My God! It's Kiddie!"
The exclamation was uttered almost simultaneously by every one in the room, and the girl Elizabeth sprang forward.