"Good!" said the clerk. He whispered his master, "What a godly show will the 'pièces de conviction' make!" and with this he wrote them down, enumerating them in separate squeaks as he penned them. Skulls,--Bones,--A woman's hair,--A thief's hand,--1 axe--2 carcases,--1 cross-bow bolt. This done he itched to search the cellar himself: there might be other invaluable morsels of evidence, an ear, or even an earring. The alderman assenting he caught up a torch and was hurrying thither, when an accident stopped him, and indeed carried him a step or two in the opposite direction. The constables had gone up the stair in single file. But the head constable no sooner saw the phosphorescent corpse seated by the bedside, than he stood stupefied: and next he began to shake like one in an ague, and, terror gaining on him more and more, he uttered a sort of howl and recoiled swiftly. Forgetting the steps, in his recoil, he tumbled over backward on his nearest companion: but _he_, shaken by the shout of dismay, and catching a glimpse of something horrid, was already staggering back, and in no condition to sustain the head constable, who, like most head constables was a ponderous man. The two carried away the third, and the three the fourth, and they streamed into the kitchen, and settled on the floor, overlapping each other like a sequence laid out on a card-table. The clerk coming hastily with his torch ran an involuntary tilt again the fourth man, who, sharing the momentum of the mass, knocked him instantly on his back, the ace of that fair quint: and there he lay kicking and waving his torch, apparently in triumph, but really in convulsion; sense and wind being driven out together by the concussion. "What is to do now, in Heaven's name?" cried the alderman, starting up with considerable alarm. But Denys explained, and offered to accompany his worship. "So be it," said the latter. His men picked themselves ruefully up, and the alderman put himself at their head and examined the premises above and below. As for the prisoners, their interrogatory was postponed till they could be confronted with the servant. Before dawn, the thieves, alive and dead, and all the relics and evidences of crime and retribution, were swept away into the law's net, and the inn was silent and almost deserted. There remained but one constable, and Denys and Gerard, the latter still sleeping heavily. CHAPTER XXXV GERARD awoke, and found Denys watching him with some anxiety. "It is you for sleeping! Why, 'tis high noon." "It was a blessed sleep," said Gerard, "methinks Heaven sent it me. It hath put as it were a veil between me and that awful night. To think that you and I sit here alive and well. How terrible a dream I seem to have had!"