nstant's doubt as to
their identity.

The reports of Ralph's disappearance, which Matthew had so assiduously
promulgated in whispers, had reached the destination which Ralph had
designed for them. The representatives of the Carlisle high constable
were conscious that they had labored under serious disadvantages in
their efforts to capture a dalesman in his own stronghold of the
mountains. Moreover, their zeal was not so ardent as to make them
eager to risk the dangers of an arrest that was likely to be full of
peril. They were willing enough to accept the story of Ralph's flight,
but they could not reasonably neglect this opportunity to assure
themselves of its credibility. So they had beaten about the house
during the morning under the pioneering of the villager whom they had
injudiciously chosen as their guide, and now they scanned the faces of
the mourners who set out on the long mountain journey.

Old Matthew's risibility was evidently much tickled by the sense of
their thwarted purpose. Despite the mournful conditions under which he
was at that moment abroad, he could not forbear to wish them, from his
place in the procession, "a gay canny mornin'"; and failing to satisfy
himself with the effect produced by this insinuating salutation, he
could not resist the further temptation of reminding them that they
had frightened and not caught their game.

"Fleyin' a bird's not the way to grip it," he cried, to the obvious
horror of the clergyman, whose first impulse was to remonstrate with
the weaver on his levity, but whose maturer reflections induced the
more passive protest of a lifted head and a suddenly elevated nose.

This form of contempt might have escaped the observation of the person
for whom it was intended had not Reuben Thwaite, who walked beside
Matthew, gently emphasized it with a jerk of the elbow and a motion of
the thumb.

"He'll glower at the moon till he falls in the midden," said Matthew
with a grunt of amused interest.

The two strangers had now gone by, and Willy Ray breathed freely, as
he thought that with this encounter the threatened danger had probably
been averted.

Then the procession wound its way slowly along the breast of Bracken
Water. When Robbie Anderson, in front, had reached a point at which a
path went up from the pack-horse road to the top of the Armboth Fell,
he paused for a moment, as though uncertain whether to pursue it.

"Keep to the auld corpse road," cried Matthew; an