all reply, Dick pointed with his finger.

At the far end of the clearing, a fir grew high above the neighbouring
wood, and planted its black shock of foliage clear against the sky. For
about fifty feet above the ground the trunk grew straight and solid like
a column. At that level, it split into two massive boughs; and in the
fork, like a mast-headed seaman, there stood a man in a green tabard,
spying far and wide. The sun glistened upon his hair; with one hand he
shaded his eyes to look abroad, and he kept slowly rolling his head from
side to side, with the regularity of a machine.

The lads exchanged glances.

"Let us try to the left," said Dick. "We had near fallen foully, Jack."

Ten minutes afterwards they struck into a beaten path.

"Here is a piece of forest that I know not," Dick remarked. "Where goeth
me this track?"

"Let us even try," said Matcham.

A few yards farther, the path came to the top of a ridge and began to go
down abruptly into a cup-shaped hollow. At the foot, out of a thick wood
of flowering hawthorn, two or three roofless gables, blackened as if by
fire, and a single tall chimney, marked the ruins of a house.

"What may this be?" whispered Matcham.

"Nay, by the mass, I know not," answered Dick. "I am all at sea. Let us
go warily."

With beating hearts, they descended through the hawthorns. Here and
there they passed signs of recent cultivation; fruit-trees and pot-herbs
ran wild among the thicket; a sun-dial had fallen in the grass; it
seemed they were treading what once had been a garden. Yet a little
farther and they came forth before the ruins of the house.

It had been a pleasant mansion and a strong. A dry ditch was dug deep
about it; but it was now choked with masonry, and bridged by a fallen
rafter. The two farther walls still stood, the sun shining through their
empty windows; but the remainder of the building had collapsed, and now
lay in a great cairn of ruin, grimed with fire. Already in the interior
a few plants were springing green among the chinks.

"Now I bethink me," whispered Dick, "this must be Grimstone. It was a
hold of one Simon Malmesbury; Sir Daniel was his bane! 'Twas Bennet
Hatch that burned it, now five years agone. In sooth, 'twas pity, for it
was a fair house."

Down in the hollow, where no wind blew, it was both warm and still; and
Matcham, laying one hand upon Dick's arm, held up a warning finger.

"Hist!" he said.

Then came a strange sound, bre