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As none, however, had seen the blow struck that deprived him of life, although each had heard the frantic exclamations of a voice that had been recognised for Ellen Halloway's, much of the marvellous was necessarily mixed up with truth in their narrative, some positively affirming Mr. de Haldimar had not once quitted his party, and declaring that nothing short of a supernatural agency could have transported him unnoticed to the fatal spot, where, in their advance, they had beheld him murdered.
"Of course you know," Brent reminded him evenly, "the first hint that you are a millionaire masquerading as a native will engulf you in local suspicion." "I don't mean that they shall learn that." Suddenly Halloway's head bent forward a little and his brows contracted. "They can't learn it except through you." "Precisely," said the smaller man, with dry brevity.
Alexander was not there. No one had seen her for two hours and, from her shack, both pack and rifle had been removed. Halloway's face when Brent found him and told him his story, first blackened into the thunder cloud darkness, then as suddenly paled into dread.
He was one of my most ardent friends and supporters, and to him, perhaps, more than to any other two men in the county, I owed my position. "Absalom Turnell's rancorous speeches had stirred all the county, and the apprehension of the outbreak his violence was in danger of bringing might have caused trouble but for John Halloway's coolness and level-headedness.
No; Joppa was far from begrudging Mr. White his departure to the land of the blessed. It was time the good old man went to his reward, they said. And as to Mrs. Whittridge, Mr. Halloway's sister, who kept house for him at the rectory, through all the length and the breadth of Joppa there were no two opinions with regard to her.
None of this escaped Halloway's lynx-like gaze but to Brent who was smoothing out the folded check, it went unobserved. Suddenly Alexander bent forward, her cheeks coloring with embarrassment and caught at the signer's wrist as spasmodically as though it were a death warrant to which he meant to set his signature.
And so the desultory talk rambled on, the little group growing larger by degrees as the approaching luncheon hour brought back the stragglers, and with them Olly, trotting contentedly along, clinging to Halloway's hand, meek as any lamb. "What were you doing when you cried out so a little while ago?" asked Gerald, going up to the child. Olly looked at her with instant defiance in his eyes.
"The next morning I went to my stable to get my horse to ride to the polls. The man a the stable said: "'He ain't fit to take out, sir. You must 'a gi'n him a mighty hard ride last night he won't tetch a moufful; he 's been in a cold sweats all night. "Sure enough, he looked it. "I took another horse and rode out by Halloway's to see the place by daylight. "It was quiet enough now.
In what that danger lay he was all at sea but it was a thing he felt and upon which he acted. The knight of the ticker jerked his head and raised a hand, and before Halloway's own arms had descended from the heights to which his yawn had stretched them, he found two pistols squarely presented to his broad chest, and heard a voice instruct with unmistakable finality, "Keep them hands up!"
If the short answer brought a cloud to Halloway's face it was one that cleared immediately into laughter. "We haven't reached that bridge yet," he announced, "and we needn't open up a Brent-Halloway feud until we get there." There was a moment's pause, after which the big fellow continued.
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