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Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug it up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because it was such a good one to burn.
One, kneeling on the flags, and busy with a small crowbar similar to that which Bryce carried inside his overcoat, was the master-mason of the cathedral. Another, standing near him, was Mitchington. A fourth whose presence made Bryce start for the second time that evening was the Duke of Saxonsteade.
All the old folds seemed, at this distance, to have been the folds of a strait-waistcoat. With abominable slowness, and very late, "on account of the war," the train crawled from Geneva, southwards. Among the travellers was a rhetorical Italian master-mason, from Lyons, an old Garibaldist, the great event of whose life was that Garibaldi had once taken lunch alone with him at Varese.
He went immediately in search of one John Lambertsen, a man in whom he knew he could confide, a Lutheran in religion, a master-mason by occupation. He found him on a scaffold against the gable-end of a house, working at his trade.
The master-mason was taking up the small squares of flagstone with his crowbar one by one, from the outer edge of the foot of the old box-tomb; as he removed each, he probed the earth beneath it.
"But who on earth would think of stealing a heap of stones?" cried a third. "Could a man carry them away in his pocket?" The master-mason, who was a gruff kind of man, stood scratching his head, and said nothing, at first. But, looking carefully on the ground, he discerned innumerable tracks of little feet, some with shoes, and some barefoot.
My first thought upon reading this note was, not of the alleged mystery of manner to which, at the outset, it alluded-for none such had I at all observed in the master-mason during his surveys but of my late kinsman, Captain Julian Dacres, long a ship-master and merchant in the Indian trade, who, about thirty years ago, and at the ripe age of ninety, died a bachelor, and in this very house, which he had built.
"Be easy; Montresor is coming with a hundred of Monsieur's gentlemen. You will recognize him; he will be disguised as a master-mason, with a rule in his hand. But, above all, do not forget the passwords. Do you know them all well, you and your friends?" "Yes, all except the Abbe de Gondi, who has not yet arrived; but 'Dieu me pardonne', I think he is there himself!
Now in those days there arrived in Florence one Pietro di Subisso, a master-mason of Arezzo, who always had under him a good number of workmen, for the reason that all the building in Arezzo passed through his hands; and he took Simone, with many others, to Arezzo.
When Prosper Alix and Paul de Sénanges reached the abode of Pichon, the master-mason, with his sons and workmen, had just completed their day’s work, and were preparing to eat the supper served by the wife and mother, a tall, gaunt woman, who looked as if a more liberal scale of housekeeping would have done her good, but on whose features the stamp of that devouring and degrading avarice which is the commonest vice of the French peasantry, was set as plainly as on the hard faces of her husband and her sons.
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