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 remarks 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. “So can I,” wheezed Chips, who was badly broken-winded. “And that’s what we shall have to do, worse luck!” “Why?” from Evan. “How can we help it?” “Nobody saw us go in or come out.” “Then do you mean to leave a dead man hanging till his head comes off?” Chips had a graphic gift which was apt to lead him a bit too far. Devereux, looking worried, and speaking snappily, promptly told him not to be a beast. “I didn’t mean to be, but I should think myself one if I slunk out of a thing like this without a word to anybody.” “I don’t see what business it is of ours.” “The man may have a wife and kids. They must be half-mad to know what’s become of him.” “We can’t help that. Besides——” Evan stopped. Jan was not putting in his word at all, but stolidly listening from his perch. “Besides what, Devereux?” “Oh, nothing.” “Of course we shall get into a _row_,” Chips admitted, cruelly; “but I shouldn’t call it a very rotten one, myself. It would be far rottener to try to avoid one now, and it might get us into a far worse row.” Evan snorted an incoherent disclaimer, to the general effect that the consequences were of course the very last consideration with him, at all events so far as his own skin went. He was quite ready to stand the racket, though he had been against the beastly haunted house from the first, and it was rather hard luck on him. But what he seemed to feel still more strongly was the hard luck on all their people, if the three of them had to give evidence at an inquest, and the whole thing got into the papers. Chips felt that he would rather enjoy that part, but he did not say so, and Jan still preserved a Delphic silence.