A few moments later he opened the door of the squire's office.
The squire, busy with his favorite occupation, the planning of a journey, sat with his feet comfortably elevated on the table. He let his chair slam to the floor and came forward to meet his guest.
"Well, David, now you are a graduate! Let me look at you! Now you are to stay with us. Why, David!" The squire stared at the countenance before him. "Are you in trouble?"
With the squire in his chair behind the desk, himself on the old settle, David told his story.
"Katy Gaumer came to the house this evening and told me a strange thing. She says that she saw my father with the communion cup in his hand the day that the service disappeared from the church."
"The communion cup?" repeated the squire, startled almost out of his wits. "What communion cup?"
"Katy saw him!" Here was Katy again, Katy who had seemed to them all to be such a promising child, Katy who was determined to go away to school, Katy who helped young rascals from her poverty, Katy who now would not study, who refused to do anything but sit dismally about! "Katy Gaumer," he repeated. "Our Katy?"
"Yes, Katy Gaumer," said David. "She says she was a little child and that she ran away from her grandmother to the church and saw my father put the silver cup into a hole made by plastering up the window."
"Impossible!" cried the squire. "Nonsense! Humbug! The girl is crazy. It couldn't be!"
David looked at him and drew a deep breath.
"That was what I said. Then I thought of Koehler, and of how he had gone mad, and I knew my father would wish it investigated."
An electric shock tingled the squire's sensorium. He remembered the contorted face, the trembling hands, the terrible earnestness with which Koehler made his attack upon the dead man.
"I thought we might get the key of the church and go out there and look about. It's bright moonlight and I believe we can see without making a light. I don't believe I can sleep until I have been out there and have looked about. I suppose we will have to get a key from the preacher."
"I have a key," said the squire. "But let us wait till to-morrow, David."
Only once were words exchanged on the journey. The two men went out the village street, past Grandfather Gaumer's, where a hundred sweet odors saluted them from the garden and where Katy lay weeping on her bed, to the path along the pike, between the open fields.