Page:Golden Fleece v1n2 (1938-11).djvu/112

 gate beckoned to the little church beyond.

The thunder of pursuit dinned closer.

Black Jem ran behind the church. And there, at his very feet, he saw a small trapdoor, leading into the church cellar. Tugging at this door, he found it unlocked. Hurriedly he let himself into the abysmal, damp gloom beneath the church.

Feeling his way through total darkness, Black Jem crept toward the rear of the cellar. Here he found a narrow stairway, at the top of which was a door. Opening this door, Black Jem tiptoed, an invisible shadow against vaultlike gloom, toward a small stained-glass window that cast a faintly tinted glow across the rows of straight-backed pews.

The horsemen were clattering past the church, were stopping in noisy disorder before a house a hundred yards down the street! Black Jem pressed his face close against the tiny diamond panes.

In the darkness, through those small colored panes, Black Jem could see nothing. And yet his position, there at the front of the church, so close to the street, gave him an odd assurance of security. He could not be surprised, and there was always the cellar trapdoor through which he could flee

HERE was a sound of many voices down the street, the opening and closing of doors, the running of men afoot. A solitary horesman rode at breakneck pace over the road Black Jem had come.

They were rousing the countryside!

In the cold, still blackness within the empty church Black Jem grinned crookedly. What matter to him if they watched the roads and scoured the thickets? Who among them would think of searching the village church for a murderer?

Suddenly Black Jem stiffened. The cluttering of men assembling down the village street was abruptly moving closer. A voice came loudly above the clamor—"Ho, now, Eben Taylor! Be you the key to the church about your person, or do it hang to home within the clock? Open up and ring the bell and call out more men!"

There was the groaning of the iron latch and the creak of the wooden gate. Black Jem, peering through the colored panes, could not see the man approaching through the thick grass between the tombstones. But no matter, the man was there. He was coming to open the church

But there was one place in the church where men never went, except to change a bellrope. The belfry!

Even as, silently and swiftly, he sought and found and climbed the ladder that led through a small square hole into the belfry, Black Jem was once more grinning to himself. They would ring the bell, and all the time he would be squatting in the belfry!

Somewhere, in the iron-solid blackness above his head, pigeons stirred and whispered sleepily, and Black Jem's nerves leaped. Then, with a grimace of disgust, he sat down upon a dusty beam and waited. Pigeons!

Black Jem's fingers, sweeping the gloom in wide circles, touched the bellrope. Black Jem wondered fleetingly if it was a big bell

The church door, twenty or more feet beneath the beam on which he sat, opened. There was a brief pause, and then, suddenly, the thick rope slid downward between his fingers, swiftly,