Page:Doctor Syn - A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh.djvu/250

 dead face of Rash looked up with protruding eyes that stared from the blood-streaked flesh.

Jerk's gallows had borne fruit.

For minutes they stood looking. The cloak had fallen from the girl's shoulders, and the shrieking wind flapped in her rough dress and tore at her streaming hair. Jerk, with his ambitions fulfilled, found himself most uncomfortably scared. For minutes neither of them spoke. They could only stare. Stare at the huddled horror and listen to the jangle of the broken gibbet chain. Suddenly Imogene remembered something which brought her back to consciousness, for she spoke:

"Jerry, after seeing that, are you afraid to return to the village alone?"

Jerry had not yet found his voice, so he shook his head.

"Then go to the Court House and report what we've found to the squire, and tell him that Imogene has gone out to keep the rest of her promise."

Jerry got her to repeat the sentence again, and he watched her leap the dyke and disappear into the mist, and then from behind the scaffold stepped the captain.

"You'll do nothing of the kind, potboy," he said, seizing Jerk's arm and leading him away from the scaffold. "I've other work for you to do. We're going back to the village to make our experiment."

As they stumbled across the Marsh, scrambling the dykes that skirted the fields, the wind got up off shore,