“It was a ghost dressed up to frighten him, and he passed through the cloisters and saw it. It wasn’t me! I’ll never speak another word, if it was me!”
“A ghost!” repeated the master in astonishment, while Ketch stretched his old neck forward, and the most intense interest was displayed by the school.
“They did it with a sheet and a blue flame,” went on Simms; who, now that the ice was broken, tried to make a clean breast of it, and grew more alarmed every moment. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t want it done, and I never lent a hand to the dressing up. If little Channing is dead, it won’t be fair to hang me.”
“Who was in the plot?” was the next question of the master. And Simms enumerated them. The master, stern and grim, beckoned to the several gentlemen to walk up, and to range themselves before him. “The lad has run some distance in his terror,” observed the master aside to Hamish, as he remembered what Judith had told him the previous night. “You will see him home in the course of the day.”
“I trust we may!” replied Hamish, with marked emphasis.
Bit by bit, word by word, the master drew the whole truth from the downcast lads. Pierce senior looked dogged and obstinate: he was inwardly vowing unheard-of revenge against Mr. Simms. Probably most of them were doing the same.
“I knowed it was them! I knowed it couldn’t be nobody but them!” broke forth old Ketch, summarily interrupting the proceedings. “You sees now, sir, what incorrigible—”
“Silence!” said the master, raising his hand. “I can deal with this without your assistance, Ketch. Hurst, who concocted this infamous plot?”
Hurst—who was the senior of the conspirators, with regard to his position in the school, though not so old as Pierce senior—could not answer it definitively. It was concocted between them, he said; not by one more than by another.
“Did you not know that a trick, such as this, has deprived men of reason?” continued the master. “And you play it upon a young and defenceless boy! I am at a loss how to express my sense of your conduct. If any ill shall have happened to him through it, you will carry it on your consciences for ever.”