"Nobody was bringing him in," retorted the landlady, "it's his business to keep a pistol. My husband, as you all know, thought it was a pistol he heard go off the night that young Mr. Castlemaine was missed, though the Commodore stood to it that it was his gun--and, as we said then, if it was a pistol, where did the pistol come from? Pistols here, pistols there: I should like to ask what we are all coming to! We sha'n't be able to step out of our door after dark next, if pistols jump into fashion." "At any rate, it seems it was a pistol last night, wherever he might have got it from," said Ben Little. "And downright careless it must have been of him to let it go off in the way he says it did--just for knocking his elbow again' the wall. Its to be known yet whether that there's not a lame tale; invented to excuse hisself." Several faces were turned on old Ben Little at this. His drift was scarcely understood. "Excuse himself from what?" demanded Mrs. Bent sharply. "Do you suppose the young fellow would shoot himself purposely, Ben Little?" "What I think," said Ben, with calmness, "if one could come to the bottom of it, is this: that there young fellow got a fright last night--see the Grey Friar most probable; and his hand shook so that the pistol went off of itself." This was so entirely new a view of probabilities, that the room sunk into temporary silence to revolve it. And not altogether an agreeable one. The Grey Friar did enough mischief as it was, in the matter of terrifying timid spirits: if it came to causing dreadful personal injuries with pistols and what not, Greylands was at a pretty pass! "Now I shouldn't wonder but that was it," cried John Bent, bringing down his hand on the table emphatically. "He saw the Grey Friar, or thought he did: and it put him into more fright than mortal man could stand. You should just have seen him last night, and the terror he was in, when me and the doctor got to him--shaking the very board he lay upon." "I'm sure he caused us fright enough," meekly interposed Sister Ann, who had been drawn into the inn (nothing loth) with the crowd. "When the Lady Superior, Sister Mary Ursula, came up to awake me and Sister Phoeby, and we saw her trembling white face, and heard that Walter Dance had taken refuge at the Nunnery, all shot about, neither of us knew how we flung our things on, to get down to him." "Walter Dance don't like going anigh the Friar's Keep any more nor the rest of us likes it; and I can't think what should have took him there last night," spoke up young Mr. Pike from the general shop. "I was talking to him yesterday evening for a good half hour if I was talking a minute; 'twas when I was shutting up: he said nothing then about going out to shoot a bird." "But he must have went to shoot one," insisted Ben Little. "Why say he did it if he didn't? What else took him to the ruins at all?"