“There was a letter I gave her some time ago—before—oh, dear!—before the rumpus was, and she was sent to Kendall! And I’m thinking,” sob, sob, “you’d maybe know something from the person who gave it me.”
“That’s it,” said Bishop coolly. “You’re a sensible woman. Who was it?”
“That girl—of Hinkson’s,” she sobbed.
“Bess Hinkson!” Mrs. Gilson ejaculated.
“Ay, sure! Oh, dear! oh, dear! Bess said that she had it from a man on the road.”
“And that may be so, or it may not,” Bishop answered, with quiet dryness. He was in his element again. And then in a lower tone, “We’re on it now,” he muttered, “or I am mistaken. I’ve seen the young lady near Hinkson’s once or twice. And it was near there I lost her. The house has been visited, of course; it was one of the first visited. But we’d no suspicion then, and now we have. Which makes a difference.”
“You’re going there?”
“Straight, sir, without the loss of a minute!”
Clyne’s eyes sparkled. And tired as they were, the men answered to the call. Ten minutes before, they had crawled in, the picture of fatigue. Now, as they crossed the pastures above the inn, and plunged into the little wood in which Henrietta had baffled Bishop, they clutched their cudgels with as much energy as if the chase were but opening. It mattered not that some wore the high-collared coats of the day, and two waistcoats under them, and had watches in their fobs; and that others tramped in smock frocks drawn over their fustian shorts. The same indignation armed all, great and small, rich and poor; and in a wonderfully short space of time they were at the gate of Starvecrow Farm.
The house that, viewed at its best, had a bald and melancholy aspect, wore a villainous look now—perched up there in bare, lowering ugliness, with its blind gable squinting through the ragged fir-trees.