Page:Doctor Syn - A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh.djvu/233

 two or three others had entered the coach, securely gagged and blindfolded the occupant, and conveyed him also to the house, the coach immediately proceeding to Dymchurch with another coachman and another lawyer, a man in a bottle-green coat.

The blindfolded lawyer had been scared out of all knowledge, especially by the sound of the voice of a certain man known as the Scarecrow. This terrible ruffian had told the lawyer that if on returning to Rye he breathed a word of what had happened they would most certainly catch him again and do away with him, adding that there was no place more convenient than Romney Marsh for the hiding of a body. So with the exception of telling his awful experience to his wife, whom he feared nearly as greatly as he feared the Scarecrow, Antony Whyllie, attorney-at-law, held his tongue, being only thankful that the rascals had let him off so easily. The coachman, who was so muddled with drink and with falling off his box at least a dozen times on the way back, never even remembered what had happened or to whose kind offices he was indebted for the privilege of becoming so gloriously drunk. So the affair passed unheeded by the public, and the gentleman in bottle green, having changed his clothes, might that very afternoon have been seen going toward the church of Dymchurch. Down into the crypt he went, and there, at a dirty table lighted by a candle set in a bottle's neck, he aided two other men to work out certain