Locking the church-door securely after me, I went down the aisle, calling softly to Fred. He came forward from a dark, high-walled pew behind a pillar, where he had slept. You should have seen him devour the bread and meat, if you’d like to know what hunger means, and drink the bottle of beer. I sat down to practise. Had old Bumford not heard the sound of the organ, he might have come thundering at the door to know what I was about, and what the silence meant. Fred came with me, and we talked whilst I played. About the first question he asked was whether Gisby was dead; but I could not tell him. He said he had gone out cautiously in the night and walked about the churchyard for an hour, thinking over what he could do. “And I really had an unpleasant adventure, Johnny,” he added.
“What was it?”
“I was pacing the path under the hedge towards Bumford’s, when all at once there arose the sound of voices and steps on the other side of it—fellows on the look-out for me, I suppose.”
I held my breath. “What did you do?”
“Crouched down as well as I could—fortunately the hedge is high—and came softly and swiftly over the grass and the graves to the porch. I only slipped inside just in time, Johnny: before I could close the door, the men were in the churchyard. The key has a trick of creaking harshly when turned in the lock, you know; and I declare I thought they must have heard it then, for it made a fearful noise, and the night was very still!”
“And they did not hear it?”
“I suppose not. But it was some minutes, I can tell you, before my pulses calmed down to their ordinary rate of beating.”
He went on to say that the only plan he could think of was to endeavour to get away from the neighbourhood, and go out of the country. To stand his trial was not to be thought of. His word, that he had not been the guilty man, had never even had a gun in his hand that night, would go for nothing, against Gisby’s word and Shepherd’s. Whatever came of it, he would have to be out of the church before Sunday. The great question was: how could he get away unseen? I told him Tod was coming with me at night, and we would consult together. Locking up the church again, and the prisoner in it, I gladdened Bumford’s heart by handing over the key, and ran home to breakfast.
Life yet lingered in Gisby; but the doctors thought he could not live through the day. The injury he had received was chiefly internal, somewhere in the region of the lungs. Fresh parties went out with fresh ardour to scour the country after Fred Westerbrook; and so the day passed. Chancing to meet Shepherd late in the afternoon, he told me Gisby still lived.