each but saying no word. Lastly he went to the little stout
man whom I had shot in the shoulder. As he looked in his face, from
which the mask had fallen aside, he started so greatly that he almost
leaped bodily in the air.

"William, William," he cried, "by the King's head, we must run for it.
This is not a 'horning' but a hanging job. _'Tis the Duke of Wellwood
himself._"

Greatly startled at the name of the great Privy Councillor and favourite
of the King, I went and looked. The man's face had fallen clear of the
velvet mask with which it had been hidden, and looked livid and grey
against the snow in the moon's uncertain light. But it was indeed the
Duke, for I had often seen him going to the Parliament in his state and
dignity, but there in the snow he looked inconceivably mean, dirty and
small.

"It's a' by wi' the estate noo, Walter," I said. "You and me maun tak'
the heather like the lave."

So saying, I snatched up the head wrapped in the plaid, which I had
almost forgotten, and called him to come on. For we were on the
outskirts of the waste ground called the King's hunting parks, and could
get directly away without passing a house.

But Walter was determined to return and see his mother, lest otherwise
the horror of the news might take her unawares. Walter was ever his
mother's boy, and I think his undutiful conduct that night now went hard
with him, seeing how the affair had turned out.

I argued with him that it was the maddest ploy thus to go back. His
lodgings would certainly be searched as soon as the Duke was found, and
the two who had escaped should return to assist the watch. But I could
not overcome his determination. He had another plan to set against mine.

"There is a vault hereabout that I used to hide in as a boy. Silly folks
say that it is haunted. But indeed there be few that know of it. You can
bide there and wait till I come."

So we went thither, and found the place commodious enough indeed, but
damp and unkindly. It was situate by the chapel wall, but of late years
it has been much filled up with rubbish since the pulling down of the
Chapel Royal by the mob in the riots of the Revolution year.

Yet even at that time it was not a place I had any stomach for. I had
liefer have been going decently to my bed in my lodgings in the West
Bow--as indeed at that moment I should, but for that daft heathercat of
a cousin of mine, with whose gallantries, for my sins, I thus found
myself sad