Eager to relieve the anxiety he felt his long and unexpected absence must be causing his mother, Lawrence Lee had no eyes for the strange stares full of wonderment and suspicion the old gaffers and goodies threw after him; but he was startled out of himself as he reached the last field skirting the lane which led to the house, by a confused hubbub of voices and angry discussion, as if the whole parish had collected between its lofty hedgerows. The spot, ordinarily so peaceful and so silent, save for the singing of the birds in the big elm boughs overhead, was now a veritable Babel; and breaking through a gap in the hedge, fresh made by the trampling of a hundred hobnailed shoes, he leaped the intervening ditch, and alighting in their very midst, demanded in imperative tones, what they did there?
For one instant, all stood as if confounded by his apparition. A thunderbolt fallen among them would have startled them less. Here had they been scouring the country pretty well since daybreak, north, south, east, west, and all points of the compass between, among Epping glades, along Hainhault hedgerows, away over Amwell, Hoddesdon, Wideford, Ware, Waltham—far and wide, the hue and cry had gone. Deep into oozing ditches, and hollow tree trunks, and pigsties, and barns, and farmhouse cellars, and gable roofs, and canal barges, and river craft, pitchforks, and sticks, and cudgels of all sorts and sizes had prodded and poked in search of farmer Lawrence Lee.
"What is the meaning of this?" indignantly demanded Lee, as half a dozen strapping fellows clad in the local militia uniform broke through the crowd of smock-frocks, and closed round him. "Is this the way you do your duty, Master Sergeant?" he went on addressing that officer, who had seized his bridle-rein.
Arrested for murder.
"Ay, it be, Master Cap'n," grinned the fellow—for Lee was the head of their company—"an' a moighty proper pretty way too. You be our prisoner!"
"Prisoner!"
"Oy, oy, it be all roight, ship-shape. You be arrested."
"On what charge?"
"That be no business o' yourn."
"The murder o' Sheriff Goodenough," shrieked an open-mouthed matron. "The murder o' Sheriff Goodenough, Master Innocence. Him as lies dead in the Warder's Room at Master Rumbold's?"