past here before dark and spies a pied skin, he
will but deem that kine are sleeping here. After dark, who will
come this way at all?"

"We shall have to," said I, somewhat doubtfully.

Erling leaped from his horse and laughed. "We may hide here for a
week if we must," he said. "I think that the trolls have all gone
to the old lands where men yet believe in them; and seeing that we
are on a good errand, your fiends should not dare come near us. I
care not if I have to come back here alone to fetch the horses when
you will."

I dismounted also, for he shamed me, and I said so. Then we tied
the steeds carefully, loosening the girths, and managed to get a
sapling or two from the undergrowth set across the door to keep
wandering cattle out. More than that we could not do, but at least
the horses were safe till we needed them, and that would hardly be
long, as we hoped. They had well fed as I slept.

Then we went away from the ruin, passing behind it up the little
slope on which it stood, meaning, if we were seen, to come down as
if we had not been near the place. And from the top of that slope
we could see the walls of the palace, with the white horse banner
of Mercia floating over them. From the roof of his villa the Roman
captain could have seen his camp, and maybe that deadly passage
into its midst was for his use. It led this way.

We waded through the ford again, and wandered down stream once
more, looking as we went for the first sign of wheel marks. I was
on the banks above the water by twenty yards, and Erling was at
their foot, close to the stream, when we had the first hope of
finding what we sought. I spied a rough farm cart standing idle and
deserted fifty yards away from me and the river, in the brushwood,
half hidden by it, as if thrust hastily there out of sight; and the
very glimpse of the thing, with its rough-hewn wheels of rounded
tree-trunk slices, iron bound, made my heart beat fast and thick,
for I feared what I might see in it.

I called Erling, and as he ran to me I pointed, and together,
without a word, we went to the cart and looked into it. It was
empty, but on its rough floor were tokens, not to be mistaken,
which told us that it was indeed the cart which Gymbert and his men
had used. And so we knew that we could not be far from the place
where they had hidden the king's body.

Now, if there had been traces of that burden which would once have
led us to its hiding place, the rain had wa