whom he had turned off at a moment's notice, in a burst of jealousy, and
indicted for a missing spoon. The man had died in prison of the jail-fever.

The Judge drew back in utter amazement. His armed companions signed
mutely; and they were again gliding over this unknown moor.

The bloated and gouty old man, in his horror considered the question of
resistance. But his athletic days were long over. This moor was a
desert. There was no help to be had. He was in the hands of strange
servants, even if his recognition turned out to be a delusion, and they
were under the command of his captors. There was nothing for it but
submission, for the present.

Suddenly the coach was brought nearly to a standstill, so that the
prisoner saw an ominous sight from the window.

It was a gigantic gallows beside the road; it stood three-sided, and
from each of its three broad beams at top depended in chains some eight
or ten bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away,
leaving the skeletons swinging lightly by their chains. A tall ladder
reached to the summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath lay
bones.

On top of the dark transverse beam facing the road, from which, as from
the other two completing the triangle of death, dangled a row of these
unfortunates in chains, a hangman, with a pipe in his mouth, much as we
see him in the famous print of the "Idle Apprentice," though here his
perch was ever so much higher, was reclining at his ease and listlessly
shying bones, from a little heap at his elbow, at the skeletons that
hung round, bringing down now a rib or two, now a hand, now half a leg.