Finding now that he did not come forward or go on speaking, the guests
particularly regarded him. They noticed to their surprise that he
stood before them the picture of abject terror--his knees trembling,
his hand shaking so violently that the door-latch by which he
supported himself rattled audibly: his white lips were parted, and his
eyes fixed on the merry officer of justice in the middle of the room.
A moment more and he had turned, closed the door, and fled.

"What a man can it be?" said the shepherd.

The rest, between the awfulness of their late discovery and the odd
conduct of this third visitor, looked as if they knew not what to
think, and said nothing. Instinctively they withdrew further and
further from the grim gentleman in their midst, whom some of them
seemed to take for the Prince of Darkness himself, till they formed
a remote circle, an empty space of floor being left between them and
him--

"... circulus, cujus centrum diabolus."

The room was so silent--though there were more than twenty people in
it--that nothing could be heard but the patter of the rain against the
window-shutters, accompanied by the occasional hiss of a stray drop
that fell down the chimney into the fire, and the steady puffing of
the man in the corner, who had now resumed his pipe of long clay.

The stillness was unexpectedly broken. The distant sound of a gun
reverberated through the air--apparently from the direction of the
county-town.

"Be jiggered!" cried the stranger who had sung the song, jumping up.

"What does that mean?" asked several.

"A prisoner escaped from the jail--that's what it means."

All listened. The sound was repeated, and none of them spoke but the
man in the chimney-corner, who said quietly, "I've often been told
that in this county they fire a gun at such times; but I never heard
it till now."

"I wonder if it is _my_ man?" murmured the personage in cinder-gray.

"Surely it is!" said the shepherd involuntarily. "And surely we've
zeed him! That little man who looked in at the door by now, and
quivered like a leaf when he zeed ye and heard your song!"

"His teeth chattered, and the breath went out of his body," said the
dairyman.

"And his heart seemed to sink within him like a stone," said Oliver
Giles.

"And he bolted as if he'd been shot at," said the hedge-carpenter.

"True--his teeth chattered, and his heart seemed to sink; and he
bolted as if he'd been shot at," slowly summed up t