"I went home and tried to sleep, but couldn't."
"Why didn't you warn the police?" asked Inglis.
"No, sir. I'm only a gipsy, and they'd have thought I'd something to do with the business. If I'd accused Mr. Vand him and his wife would have accused me, and it would be two to one. Besides," said Luke coolly, "I wasn't sorry to see old Huxham downed after killing the other gent. Serve him right, say I. So that's all."
"Humph," said Inglis, finishing his writing. "You made capital out of this?"
"Yes, I did," said Luke defiantly, and taking the pen which Inglis held out to him. "I told Mr. and Mrs. Vand what I'd seen. They were frightened--it was the next morning, you see--and paid me heaps of money to hold my tongue. Then, like a fool, I went on the bend, and talked so much that Granny got to know heaps, and so set the nigger brute on our tracks. There"--Luke signed his name--"you can't hang me for what I've told you."
Inglis and Lister both signed as witnesses, and the inspector put the paper into his pocket. He was about to ask further questions--to cross-examine Tunks in fact--when the door opened and a young constable appeared in a mighty state of excitement.
"Sir," he cried to his superior officer, "Mrs. Vand has escaped!"
"Escaped!" cried the inspector, in a voice of thunder.
"Yes, sir. Dutton is lying drugged in the hut, and the old woman has been stunned. Mrs. Vand and the gipsy girl are gone."
Next morning there was a great sensation in the village of Marshely, as in some way the events of the previous night leaked out. Certainly, the accounts of these were more or less garbled, and no one appeared to know who was responsible for them. But this much of the truth became public property, that Vand and the negro prince who had been stopping at "The Chequers" were dead, that Mrs. Vand had fled to escape arrest, and that the police were in possession of Bleacres. Later in the afternoon it became known that Vand had killed Captain Huxham for the sake of certain jewels.
But the villagers were greatly astonished when they heard--from what source was not known--that another man had been killed. No one, save Silas Pence, had seen Edwin Lister enter the Manor, and Pence himself had presumed, until informed, that the man was Cyril, so no one knew that any person was missing. Now it appeared that the man who was murdered by Vand had committed a crime himself previous to his own death. But what he had done with the body no one knew, and the police could find no traces of the same in spite of all their efforts.