It
might be that the witch could not hurt them; but certain it was that,
when all the country was out searching for them, she had led them
straight back to the Corporal. As to the Corporal being thrown from
his horse, Mrs. Mugford had heard such stories before; and it was
strange that he had found his way home safe enough though he had left
the children to be eaten alive, for aught he knew. It was strange,
too, that he was waiting in the right place for the children next day
when the witch brought them down, and that the witch had vanished, as
Mrs. Mugford averred, in a cloud of brimstone smoke.
So the feeling against the Corporal in the village increased, and not
the less because he looked ill for some days after the children's
adventure, owing partly to the shaking which he had received in his
fall, and partly to the miserable hours of anxiety and watching that
had succeeded to it. The villagers of course attributed his appearance
to the torment of a guilty conscience, and no one was more careful to
dwell on this explanation than Mrs. Mugford, with a vehemence which
surprised even Mrs. Fry, who knew the sharpness of her tongue better
than her neighbours.
The Corporal took no more heed of the villagers' coldness than before;
for a new matter had come forward to occupy his thoughts. While he was
walking one day with the children through the wood above the village,
Dick suddenly stopped and said that he had certainly seen a man
slinking off the path into the covert; and the Corporal at once hurried
to the spot in the hope that it might be the idiot.
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