And so they quartered themselves upon the village, and their victims in a barn, "until," said this same worthy follower of Kirke, "on the morrow they should be quartered for good and all." Moreover, with a more exquisite touch of that cruelty in which they were so skilled, they had concealed the faces of these three poor fellows from the public gaze, in the hope that anxiety for the morrow should be the more widely spread over the sleepless pillows of the village. Now during that night, when few slept, but terror reigned more silent than sleep, a strange thing happened. For many a year after, the matter was known in full to few but myself, and to me not till little Prudence Emmet had come to trust and confide in her new mistress. So much narrative I have of my own to unwind, that I will waste little space upon hers, telling but in brief that the third of these men, taken in arms and condemned without judge or jury, was indeed her grandfather; that she and her father had come to know it; that in the dead of night she had contrived with liquor and flattery, and mayhap by implicit proffer of kindness she purposed never to grant, to keep the sentry busy, and even a little to draw him off, while her father, after forced and secret entry at the hinder part of the barn, had privily withdrawn that old hothead Simon (now like to pay so dear for his besotted enthusiasm) from his prison, and had carried him upon his great shoulders, an inglorious Anchises concealed in a sack, five miles across country, and there fairly buried him alive in a secret cave or hole in the hillside by well-nigh walling up the mouth thereof, and bodily transplanting a young tree to conceal all signs of his labors. Yet was he back in his cottage before the ensign and his men had slept off the fumes of their wine.