The men, who had been hired for the day, looked at their hands and knees, muddy with creeping on all fours so frequently, and rubbed their noses, as if they had almost had enough of it; for the quantity of bad air which had passed into each one’s nostril had rendered it nearly as insensible as a flue.  However, after a moment’s hesitation, they prepared to start anew, except three, whose power of smell had quite succumbed under the excessive wear and tear of the day.

By this time not a male villager was to be seen in the parish.  Owlett was not at his mill, the farmers were not in their fields, the parson was not in his garden, the smith had left his forge, and the wheelwright’s shop was silent.

‘Where the divil are the folk gone?’ said Latimer, waking up to the fact of their absence, and looking round.  ’I’ll have ’em up for this!  Why don’t they come and help us?  There’s not a man about the place but the Methodist parson, and he’s an old woman.  I demand assistance in the king’s name!’

‘We must find the jineral public afore we can demand that,’ said his lieutenant.

’Well, well, we shall do better without ’em,’ said Latimer, who changed his moods at a moment’s notice.  ’But there’s great cause of suspicion in this silence and this keeping out of sight, and I’ll bear it in mind.  Now we will go across to Owlett’s orchard, and see what we can find there.’

Stockdale, who heard this discussion from the garden-gate, over which he had been leaning, was rather alarmed, and thought it a mistake of the villagers to keep so completely out of the way.  He himself, like the excisemen, had been wondering for the last half-hour what could have become of them.  Some labourers were of necessity engaged in distant fields, but the master-workmen should have been at home; though one and all, after just showing themselves at their shops, had apparently gone off for the day.  He went in to Lizzy, who sat at a back window sewing, and said, ‘Lizzy, where are the men?’

Lizzy laughed.  ‘Where they mostly are when they’re run so hard as this.’  She cast her eyes to heaven.  ‘Up there,’ she said.

Stockdale looked up.  ‘What—­on the top of the church tower?’ he asked, seeing the direction of her glance.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I expect they will soon have to come down,’ said he gravely.  ’I have been listening to the officers, and they are going to search the orchard over again, and then every nook in the church.’

Lizzy looked alarmed for the first time.  ’Will you go and tell our folk?’ she said.  ‘They ought to be let know.’  Seeing his conscience struggling within him like a boiling pot, she added, ’No, never mind, I’ll go myself.’

She went out, descended the garden, and climbed over the churchyard wall at the same time that the preventive-men were ascending the road to the orchard.  Stockdale could do no less than follow her.  By the time that she reached the tower entrance he was at her side, and they entered together.