t, screaming like a woman. A dozen assailants
rolled down the steps, with him in the midst of them. He got clear for a
moment, but twenty more rushed at him, and again he was torn and battered
and kicked. "Police! police!" he cried; and at last the detectives who
came to seize him rushed in, and Colonel Clifford, too, with the voice of
a stentor, cried, "The law! Respect the law, or you are ruined men."

And so at last the law he had so dreaded raised what seemed a bag of
bones: nothing left on him but one boot and fragments of a shirt,
ghastly, bleeding, covered with bruises, insensible, and to all
appearance dead.

After a short consultation, they carried him, by Colonel Clifford's
order, to the Dun Cow, where Lucy, it may be remembered, was awaiting his
triumphant return.

CHAPTER XXVI.

STRANGE TURNS.

And yet this catastrophe rose out of a mistake. When the detective asked
Jem Davies to watch the lawn, he never suspected that the clergyman was
the villain who had been concerned in that explosion. But Davies, a man
of few ideas and full of his own wrong, took for granted, as such minds
will, that the policeman would not have spoken to him if this had not
been _his_ affair; so he and his fellows gathered about the steps and
watched the drawing-room. They caught a glimpse of Monckton, but that
only puzzled them. His appearance was inconsistent with the only
description they had got--in fact opposed to it. It was Grace Clifford's
denunciation, trumpet-tongued, that let loose savage justice on the
villain. Never was a woman's voice so fatal, or so swift to slay. She
would have undone her work. She screamed, she implored; but it was all in
vain. The fury she had launched she could not recall. As for Bartley,
words can hardly describe his abject terror. He crouched, he shivered, he
moaned, he almost swooned; and long after it was all over he was found
crouched in a corner of the little room, and his very reason appeared to
be shaken. Judge Lynch had passed him, but too near. The freezing shadow
of Retribution chilled him.

Colonel Clifford looked at him with contemptuous pity, and sent him home
with John Baker in a close carriage.

* * * * *

Lucy Monckton was in the parlor of the Dun Cow waiting for her master.
The detectives and some outdoor servants of Clifford Hall brought a short
ladder and paillasses, and something covered with blankets, to the door.
Lucy saw, but did