"Ho," said the reeve, with his hand on his sword hilt, "who comes?"

"Is that you, reeve? Well glad am I. Are you out with a posse
against those knaves at the ford?"

"Eh," said the reeve, while we all halted, "is the ford beset with
the Welsh?"

The man laughed somewhat.

"Not Welsh, but thieves of nearer kin. I ride homeward along the
river bank, and they stop me. It seemed to put them out that my
horse is not skew-bald, and that I am alone. However, they would
rob me."

The reeve whistled under his breath.

"How have you got away?" he asked.

"Rode over one of them who held my horse. There was one after me,
or more."

Now the reeve turned to me.

"What is to be done?" he said blankly. "This is what we had to fear
most of all. This is surely Gymbert with his men."

"How many may there be?" said I.

"Ten or a dozen, and mostly mounted," the stranger told me.

Now I had no time to think of aught, for the men who waited for us
heard the voices, and had been told that we had halted; whereon
here they came up the road at a hand gallop, in silence. The two
men of the reeve made no more ado, but fled townwards, and after
them, swearing, went their leader. With him the stranger went also,
shouting, and we three were left in the road with plunging horses;
and then, with a wild half thought that we might meet and cut our
way through these knaves ere they knew we were on them, I bethought
me of somewhat. I cried to Erling, and caught Hilda's bridle, and
so leaped from the road to the meadow, and held on straight across
it toward the dim outlines of bush and furze clumps which I
remembered as being close to our first camp.

I suppose that against the black woodland, with the town rampart
beyond us, we were hardly noted, or else those who came made sure
that we must try to get back to the town. At all events along the
road they thundered, past where we had stopped, and on after the
reeve and his men, who were shouting for the guard to open to them.

So we did not turn to right or left, but rode our hardest across
the soft turf, among the ashes of our camp fires, until we were
close on the place where Ethelbert had dreamed his dream of Fernlea
church under the riverside trees, by the pool where I had bathed
and frightened the franklin by my pranks. That schoolboy jest had
flashed into my mind with the memory of the shallows and
half-forgotten ford across them. I thought I might find it again.

"They are after