But when this also proved fruitless, 'I wonder,' said the ferryman, 'whether he stuffed that violin of his with banknotes. A hundred-pound note don't take up a terrible space.'
Again he encountered disappointment.
'We will rip open each pillow and mattress,' said Dench. 'I've heard of large fortunes being secreted thus, and that is just where no preventive men would look for kegs.'
He unpicked a seam, thrust in his hand, and groped through the feathers of pillows and the wool of flock mattresses. Had there been a guinea secreted in either he would have fingered it. But there was nothing of that sort—dust only, and that not of gold.
Olver was puzzled, angry, disheartened.
'Can it be anywhere outside the house?' he asked. 'Jack, to-morrow with the daylight we will give up hours to the search and leave not a stone unturned, not a bush unexamined. I'm darned, but it is somewhere.'
With a hard, unmoved face, Jane Marley had watched and attended on the two men.
She had been with Mrs. Jose to Bindon, helping to carry back the articles lent from the farm for the funeral feast. As she had neared the house Mrs. Jose had said to her, 'Jane, Winefred has got a valuable watch, worth forty guineas, I should say, and she tells me a strange tale about it—that she has met and talked with her father, who gave it to her.'
'Yes, it was so.'