He was waiting for the boy, David Ripper.  Fully convinced by the lad’s manner at the inquest that he had not told all he knew, but was keeping something back in fear, Mr. Pike, for reasons of his own, resolved to come at it if he could.  He knew that the boy would be at work later than usual that night, having been hindered in the afternoon.

Imagine yourself standing with your back to the river, reader, and take a view of the premises as they face you.  The cottage is a square building, and has four good rooms on the ground floor.  The miller’s thrifty wife generally locked all these rooms up if she went out, and carried the keys away in her pocket.  The parlour window was an ordinary sash-window, with outside shutters; the kitchen window a small casement, protected by a fixed net-work of strong wire.  No one could get in or out, even when the casement was open, without tearing this wire away, which would not be a difficult matter to accomplish.  On the left of the cottage, but to your right as you face it, stands the mill, to which you ascend by steps.  It communicates inside with the upper floor of the cottage, which is used as a store-room for corn; and from this store-room a flight of stairs descends to the kitchen below.  Another flight of stairs from this store-room communicated with the open passage leading from the back-door to the stable.  This is all that need be said:  and you may think it superfluous to have described it at all:  but it is not so.

The boy Ripper at length came forth.  With a shuddering avoidance of the water he came tearing along as one running from a ghost, and was darting past the trees, when he found himself detained by an arm of great strength.  Mr. Pike clapped his other hand upon the boy’s mouth, stifling a howl of terror.

“Do you see this, Rip?” cried he.

Rip did see it.  It was a pistol held rather inconveniently close to the boy’s breast.  Rip dearly loved his life; but it nearly went out of him then with fear.

“Now,” said Pike, “I’ve come up to know about this business of Lord Hartledon’s, and I will know it, or leave you as dead as he is.  And I’ll have you took up for murder, into the bargain,” he rather illogically continued, “as an accessory to the fact.”

David Ripper was in a state of horror; all idea of concealment gone out of him.  “I couldn’t help it,” he gasped.  “I couldn’t get out to him; I was locked up in the mill.  Don’t shoot me.”

“I’ll spare you on one condition,” decided Pike.  “Disclose the whole of this from first to last, and then we may part friends.  But try to palm off one lie upon me, and I’ll riddle you through.  To begin with:  what brought you locked up in the mill?”