“I’ll do it,” declared Mr. Crymble, with alacrity.  “I knew you’d find her out.  Now that you’re with me, I’m with you.  I’ll hide.  You fix ’em.  ’Tend to her first.”  He grabbed the Cap’n by the arm.  “There’s a secret about that barnyard that no one knows but me.  Blind his eyes!”

He pointed to Mr. Reeves.  There was no time to delve into Mr. Crymble’s motives just then.  There was just time to act.  The blank wall of the ell shut off Mrs. Crymble’s view of the scene.  Constable Nute was still well down the road.  There was only the basilisk Mr. Reeves on the woodpile.  Cap’n Sproul grabbed up a quilt spread to air behind the ell, and with a word to Hiram as he passed him he scrambled up the heap of wood.  Hiram followed, and the next moment they had hoodwinked the amazed Mr. Reeves and held him bagged securely in the quilt.

The Cap’n, with chin over his shoulder, saw Mr. Crymble scuff aside some frozen dirt in a corner of the barnyard, raise a plank with his bony fingers and insert his slender figure into the crevice disclosed, with all the suppleness of a snake.  The plank dropped over his head, and his hiding-place was hidden.  But while he and Hiram stood looking at the place where Mr. Crymble had disappeared, there sounded a muffled squawk from the depths, there was the dull rumble of rocks, an inward crumbling of earth where the planks were, a puff of dust, and stillness.

“Gawd A’mighty!” blurted Hiram, aghast, “a dry well’s caved in on him.”

“I told him to find a hole and crawl into it,” quavered the Cap’n, fiddling trembling finger under his nose, “but I didn’t tell him to pull the hole in after him.”

Mr. Reeves, left free to extricate himself from the quilt, bellowed to Mrs. Crymble and addressed the astonished Nute, who just then swung into the yard.

“They murdered that man, and I see ’em do it!” he squalled, and added, irrelevantly, “they covered my head up so I couldn’t see ’em do it.”

Mrs. Crymble, who had been dignifiedly keeping the castle till the arrival of the constable, swooped upon the scene with hawk-like swiftness.

“This day’s work will cost you a pretty penny, Messers Look and Sproul,” she shrilled.  “Killin’ a woman’s husband ain’t to be settled with salve, a sorry, and a dollar bill, Messers Sproul and Look.”

“I reckon we’re messers, all right,” murmured the Cap’n, gazing gloomily on the scene of the involuntary entombment of the three-times-dead Crymble.  “I couldn’t prove that he was ever dead in his life, but there’s one thing I’ve seen with my own eyes.  He acted as his own sexton, and that’s almost as unbelievable as a man’s comin’ back to life again.”

“I ain’t lookin’ for him to come back this last time,” remarked Hiram, with much conviction; “unless there’s an inch drain-pipe there and he comes up it like an angleworm.  Looks from this side of the surface as though death, funeral service, interment, and mournin’ was all over in record time and without music or flowers.”