And the wind blew and blew.

In a tavern of foul repute three men were lapping gin.  Their names were Joe and Will and the gypsy Puglioni; none other names had they, for of whom their fathers were they had no knowledge, but only dark suspicions.

Sin had caressed and stroked their faces often with its paws, but the face of Puglioni Sin had kissed all over the mouth and chin.  Their food was robbery and their pastime murder.  All of them had incurred the sorrow of God and the enmity of man.  They sat at a table with a pack of cards before them, all greasy with the marks of cheating thumbs.  And they whispered to one another over their gin, but so low that the landlord of the tavern at the other end of the room could hear only muffled oaths, and knew not by Whom they swore or what they said.

These three were the staunchest friends that ever God had given unto a man.  And he to whom their friendship had been given had nothing else besides, saving some bones that swung in the wind and rain, and an old torn coat and iron chains, and a soul that might not go free.

But as the night wore on the three friends left their gin and stole away, and crept down to that graveyard where rested in his sepulchre Paul, Archbishop of Alois and Vayence.  At the edge of the graveyard, but outside the consecrated ground, they dug a hasty grave, two digging while one watched in the wind and rain.  And the worms that crept in the unhallowed ground wondered and waited.

And the terrible hour of midnight came upon them with its fears, and found them still beside the place of tombs.  And the three friends trembled at the horror of such an hour in such a place, and shivered in the wind and drenching rain, but still worked on.  And the wind blew and blew.

Soon they had finished.  And at once they left the hungry grave with all its worms unfed, and went away over the wet fields stealthily but in haste, leaving the place of tombs behind them in the midnight.  And as they went they shivered, and each man as he shivered cursed the rain aloud.  And so they came to the spot where they had hidden a ladder and a lantern.  There they held long debate whether they should light the lantern, or whether they should go without it for fear of the King’s men.  But in the end it seemed to them better that they should have the light of their lantern, and risk being taken by the King’s men and hanged, than that they should come suddenly face to face in the darkness with whatever one might come face to face with a little after midnight about the Gallows Tree.

On three roads in England whereon it was not the wont of folk to go their ways in safety, travellers tonight went unmolested.  But the three friends, walking several paces wide of the King’s highway, approached the Gallows Tree, and Will carried the lantern and Joe the ladder, but Puglioni carried a great sword wherewith to do the work which must be done.  When they came close, they saw how bad was the case with Tom, for little remained of that fine figure of a man and nothing at all of his great resolute spirit, only as they came they thought they heard a whimpering cry like the sound of a thing that was caged and unfree.