away."

"Aw, well--I done my best. You'll remember that, Nance. You know what
the Sark men are. He'd be safest away. You tell him I say so," and he
pouched his discounted piece of evidence and turned and went, leaving
Nance with a heavy heart.

For, as Peter said, she knew what the Sark men were--a law unto
themselves, and slow to move out of the deep-cut grooves of the past,
but, once stirred to boiling point, capable of going to any lengths
without consideration of consequences.

And therein lay Gard's peril.

CHAPTER XIX

HOW THE SARK MEN FELT ABOUT IT

Every soul in the Island that could by any means get there, was in or
outside the school-house, mostly outside, long before the clock struck
two. Never in their lives had they hurried thither like that before.

A barricade of forms had been made across the room. Within it, at the
school-master's table, sat the Senechal, Philip Guille, and the Doctor,
and old Mr. Cachemaille, the Vicar, ageing rapidly since the tragic
death of his good friend, the late Seigneur; beside them stood the
Prevot and the Greffier, behind them lay the body of Tom Hamon covered
with a sheet.

It was a perfect day, with a cloudless blue sky and blazing sun, and all
the windows were opened wide. Those inside dripped with perspiration,
but felt cold chills below their blue guernseys each time they looked at
that stark figure with the upturned feet beneath the cold white sheet.

Outside the barricade stood Elie Guille, the Constable, and his
understudy Abraham Baker, the Vingtenier, to keep order and call the
witnesses.

The Seigneur, Mr. Le Pelley, was away or he would undoubtedly have been
there too. In his absence the Senechal conducted the proceedings.

In the front row of school-desks, scored with the deep-cut initials of
generations of Sark boys, sat the dead man's widow, tense and quivering,
her eyes consuming fires in deep black wells, her face livid, her hands
clenched still as though waiting for something to rend.

More than one of the men who sat beside her at the desk found, with a
grim smile, his own name looking up at him out of the maltreated board.
And one nudged his neighbour and pointed to the name of Tom Hamon, cut
deeper than any of the others and with the N upside down.

Very briefly the Senechal stated that they were there to find out, if
they could, how Tom Hamon came by his death, and added very gravely, in
a deep silence, that after a most careful e