Page:Moonfleet - John Meade Falkner.pdf/81

 With that she bangs the door in the parson's face, and off he goes to Ratsey, but can learn nothing there, and so concludes that I have run away to sea, and am seeking ship at Poole or Weymouth.

But that same day came Sam Tewkesbury to the Why Not about nightfall, and begged a glass of rum, being, as he said, "all of a shake," and telling a tale of how he passed the churchyard wall on his return from work, and in the dusk heard screams and wailing voices, and knew 'twas Blackbeard piping his lost Mohunes to hunt for treasure. So, though he saw nothing, he turned tail, and never stopped running till he stood at the inn door. Then, forthwith, Elzevir leaves Sam to drink at the Why Not alone, and himself sets off running up the street to call for Master Ratsey; and they two make straight across the sea-meadows in the dark.

"For as soon as I heard Tewkesbury tell of screams and wailings in the air, and no one to be seen," said Elzevir, "I guessed that some poor soul had got shut in the vault, and was there crying for his life. And to this I was not guided by mother wit, but by a surer and a sadder token. Thou wilt have heard how thirteen years ago a daft body we called Cracky Jones was found one morning in the churchyard dead. He was gone missing for a week before, and twice within that week I had sat through the night upon the hill behind the church watching to warn the lugger with a flare she could not put in for the surf upon the beach. And on those nights, the air being still though a heavy swell was running, I heard thrice or more a throttled scream come shivering across the meadows from the grave-