“Then why have you not taken up the three Standishes?” retorted the Squire. “Of course it is the Standishes.”
“Well, your honour, because I can’t get at ’em,” said Jones helplessly. “Jim, he is off somewhere; and Dick, he swears through thick and thin that he was never out of his bed last night; and t’other, Tom, ain’t apperiently at home at all just now. I looked in at their kitchen on my way here, and that was all I could get out of Mary.”
It was at this juncture that Katrine arrived, preparatory to her morning’s work with Lena. Old Jones and the Squire, still in the hall, were chanting a duet upon the poachers’ iniquity, and she halted by me to listen. I was sitting on the elbow of the carved-oak settle. Katrine looked pale as a sheet.
Girls, thought I, do not like to hear of these things. For I knew nothing then of her fears that the offenders had been her father and Mr. Reste.
“If the poachers had been taken, sir—what then?” she said tremblingly to the Squire, in a temporary lull of the voices.
“What then, Miss Barbary? Why then they would have been lodged in gaol, and the neighbourhood well rid of them,” was the impulsive answer.
“Snug and safe, miss,” put in old Jones, shuffling on his gouty legs in his thick white stockings, “a-waiting to stand their trial next spring assizes at Worcester. Which it would be transportation for ’em, I hope—a using o’ their guns indeed!”
“Were they known at all?” gasped Katrine. “And might not the gamekeepers have shot them? Perhaps have killed them?”
“Killed ’em or wounded ’em, like enough,” assented Jones, “and it would be a good riddance of such varmint, as his worship says, miss. And a misfortin it is that they be not known. Which is an odd thing to my mind, sir, considering the lightness o’ the night: and I’d like to find out whether them there keepers did their duty, or didn’t do it.”
“I can’t see the dog anywhere, father,” interrupted Tod, dashing in at this moment in a white heat, for he had been racing about in search of Don.