Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/166

 "Dead?" whispered Chips through chattering teeth.

"Dead for days," Jan muttered back. "And he's come in here and hung himself in the haunted house!"

Crashing noises came from the stairs; it was Evan in full flight, jumping many at a time. Chips was after him on the instant, and Jan after Chips when he had closed the chamber of death behind him.

The horrified boys did not go by the gate as they had come, but smashed the rotten fence at the end of the awful garden in the frenzy of their flight across country. It was as though they had done the hideous deed themselves; over the fields they fled pell-mell, up-hill and down-dale, through emerald-dusted hedge and brimming ditch, as in a panic of blood-guiltiness. Spring still smiled on them sunnily, breezily. Spring birds welcomed them back with uninterrupted song. The boys had neither eyes nor ears, but only bursting hearts and breaking limbs, until a well-known steeple pricked the sky, and they flung themselves down in a hollow between a ploughed field, rich as chocolate, and a meadow alive with ewes and lambs.

Chips was speechless, because he was not supposed to run; but Evan, a notoriously dapper little dandy, seldom to be seen dishevelled out of flannels, was the one who looked least like himself. He lay on his stomach in the fretted shadow of a stunted oak. But Jan sat himself on the timber rails between bleating lambs and chocolate furrows, and made the same remark more than once.

"It's a bad job," said Jan at intervals.

"But are you sure about it?" Evan sat up to ask eventually. "Are you positive it was a man, and that the man was dead?"

"I can swear to it," said Jan.