They scattered, and searched the whole dark bay minutely, but found nothing.  Then with rough gentleness they bore the body to the boat and laid it under the thwarts.

“Men!” said the Senechal weightily, as they were just about to climb back into their boats.  “This matter brings another matter home to all our hearts.  You have been persecuting another man under the belief that he killed Tom Hamon.  From what some of us knew of Mr. Gard, we were certain he could have had no hand in it.  This, I take it, proves it?” He looked at the Doctor.

“Undoubtedly!” nodded the Doctor.  “The man who killed this one killed the other, and that man could not be Stephen Gard, for he is on L’Etat.”

“It’s God’s mercy that you haven’t Mr. Gard’s blood on your heads.  Some of you, I know, have done your best that way.  Suppose you had killed him that other night—­what would you have felt as you stood here to-day?  Take that thought home with you, and may God keep you from like misjudgment in the future!”

And they had not a word to say for themselves, but crawled silently aboard, and in silence pulled back to Creux Harbour.

Once only old John de Carteret spoke to the Senechal, soon after they had started.

“One of them”—­nodding over at the boats behind—­“could go to the rock and bring him off,” he suggested.

“I thought of that, but there’s one I want to go with me.  She’ll be down at the Creux, I expect, and we’ll go as soon as we’ve disposed of this.”

There was a very different feeling visible in the silent crowd that awaited them at the harbour this time from that manifested on the last occasion, Then, it was a sympathetic anger that united them all in a common feeling against the perpetrator of the deed.  Now—­even before the whisper had run round that Peter Mauger had been done to death in the same way as Tom Hamon—­fear was among them, and doubt.  Fear of they knew not exactly what, and doubt of they knew not whom.

But here were two men done to death in their midst, and the man on whom all their suspicions had settled in the first case could not possibly have had anything to do with the second, and so had most likely had nothing to do with either—­in which case the man who had was still at large among them, and no man’s life was safe, much less any woman’s or child’s.

Their thoughts did not run, perhaps, quite so clearly as that, but that was the result of it all, and their faces showed it.  Furthermore, every man and woman there began at once to cast about in his and her mind for the possible murderer, and men looked at the neighbours whom they had known all their lives, with lurking suspicions in their eyes and the consideration of strange possibilities in their minds.

Tom Hamon’s death had bound them closer together; Peter Mauger’s set them all apart.  The strange dead man up in the school-house added to their discomfort.