"Don't you think it might have been as well if you had told the truth from the first?" asked the Squire, rather sarcastically. "Well, sir, one's mind gets confused at times, and I thought of his mother. I could not be off seeing that if anything had happened, it lay on my shoulders for having left him alone, in there." Whether the Squire believed Hill could tell more, I don't know. I did. As we went on to the school-house, the Pater kept silence. Miss Timmens was frightfully disappointed at the result, and said Hill was a shifty scoundrel. "I cannot tell what to think," the Squire remarked to her. "His manner is the strangest I ever saw; it is just as though he had something on his conscience. He said the boy's ghost seemed to haunt him. Did you notice that, Johnny?" "Yes, sir. A queer idea." "He--he--never could have found David dead in the morning?" cried Miss Timmens, in a low tone, herself turning a little pale. "Dead of fright?" "That could not be," said the Squire. "You forget that David had made his escape before midnight, and was at his mother's, calling to her." "True, true," assented Miss Timmens. "Any way, I am certain Hill is somehow or other deceiving us, and he is a born villain for doing it." But Hill, deceiving us though he had been, could not hold out. In going back, we saw him leaning over the palings waiting for us. But that the man is living yet, I should have said he was going to die there and then, for he looked exactly like it. It seemed that just after we left him, a policeman had made his appearance. Not as a policeman, but as a friend; for he and Hill were cronies. He told Hill confidentially that there was "going to be a row over that there lost boy; that folks were saying that he might have been murdered; that unless Hill could tell something satisfactory about him, he and others might be in custody before the day was over." Whether Hill found himself brought to a point from which there was neither advance nor retreat, or that he inevitably saw that concealment could no longer be maintained, or that he was stricken to despair and felt helpless, I know not. There he stood, his head over the palings, saying he would tell all. It was a sad tale to listen to. Miss Timmens's last supposition was right--Hill, upon going up to release David Garth, had found him dead. And, so far as the man's experience of death went, he must have been dead for six or seven hours. "I'd like you to come and see him, sir," panted Hill. Gingerly stepped the Squire in Hill's wake across the garden to the shed. Unlocking the door, Hill stepped back for us to enter. On a mattress on the ground was David, laid straight in his every-day clothes, and covered with a blanket; his pretty hair, which his mother had so loved, carefully smoothed. Hill,--rough, burly, cross-grained Hill,--burst into tears and sobbed like a child.