"How many of them are there?" said Jarvis Kerruish.
"Five, sir," said the coroner, "Quilleash, Teare, Corkell, Crennell, and the lad Davy."
"Then is he not with them?" cried the Deemster, in a tone that went to the Bishop's heart like iron.
The coroner glanced uneasily at the Bishop, and said, "He was with them, and he is still somewhere about."
"Then away with you; arrest them, quick," the Deemster cried in another tone.
"But what of the warrant, sir?" said the coroner.
"Simpleton, are you waiting for that?" the Deemster shouted, with a contemptuous sweep of the hand. "Where have you been, that you don't know that your own warrant is enough? Arrest the scoundrels, and you shall have warrant enough when you come back."
But as the six men were pushing their way through the people, and leaping the cobble wall of the churchyard, the Deemster picked from the ground a piece of slate-stone that had come up from the vault, and scraped his initials upon it with a pebble.
"Take this token, and go after them," he said to Jarvis Kerruish, and instantly Jarvis was following the coroner and his constables, with the Deemster's legal warranty for their proceedings.
It was the work of a moment, and the crowd that had stood with drooping heads about the Bishop had now broken up in confusion. The Bishop himself had not spoken; a shade of bodily pain had passed over his pale face, and a cold damp had started from his forehead. But hardly had the coroner gone, or the people recovered from their bewilderment, when the Bishop lifted one hand to bespeak silence, and then said, in a tone impossible to describe: "Can any man say of his own knowledge that my son was on the 'Ben-my-Chree' last night?"