“A third! Who?”
“He as lives a bit further above.”
“You mean—?”
“The French priest. Them three ain’t often far apart; an’ if I beant astray in my recknin’, they were mighty close thegither that same night, an’ nigh Llangorren Court. They’re all in, or about, it now—the precious tribang—an’ I’d bet big they’ve got foot in there by the foulest o’ foul play. Yes, Captain; sure as we be sittin’ in this boat, she as owned the place ha’ been murdered—the men as done it bein’ Lewin Murdock, Dick Dempsey, and the Roman priest o’ Rogues!”
Volume Three—Chapter Four.
A Suspicious Craft.
To the waterman’s unreserved statement of facts and suspicions, Captain Ryecroft makes no rejoinder. The last are in exact consonance with his own already conceived, the first alone new to him.
And on the first he now fixes his thoughts, directing them to that particular one of a boat being in the neighbourhood of the Llangorren grounds about the time he was leaving them. For it, too, has a certain correspondence with something on the same night observed by himself—a circumstance he had forgotten, or ceased to think of; but now recalled with vivid distinctness. All the more as he listens to the conjectures of Wingate—about three men having been in that boat, and whom he supposed them to be.