to remove every trace of himself as he passed onward to the goal ahead
of him--to obliterate his tracks entirely.

He rode quietly through the town, therefore, observing what good and
comfortable-looking inns those were which the man had mentioned, but
at the same time regretfully avoiding them. For under no circumstances
would he have felt justified in alighting at either--he doubted if he
could have afforded to do so. When he received Rooke's hasty summons
to join him he had but forty-five guineas, saved after two years of
an existence that at best had been a hard one. It had been a task to
accumulate even that sum, a task entailing careful living, abstinence,
almost even a life of total deprivation; when he had paid scrupulously
every farthing he owed in the neighbourhood where he lodged, the sum
had dwindled down to thirty-five guineas. It was little enough to
enable him now to reach Troyes and provide for himself and the horse
he had become possessed of on the road, to regain his child, and find
his way back to England--if he succeeded in doing so.

To find his way back to England! Would that be possible? Could he pass
through the north of France undiscovered? Could he, the ex-galley
slave, the man whose face had become known to hundreds of persons
connected with the galleys, besides having been known to hundreds of
soldiers also, with whom he had been quartered, hope to escape
recognition?

"God only knows!" he murmured as he rode through the empty streets of
the already dead-and-gone city. "He alone knows. Yet, ere I will be
taken alive--ere the mark upon my shoulder shall ever testify against
me--I will end it all! Yet, courage! courage! At present I am safe."

He reached the neighbourhood of the east gate, for he had traversed
the whole of Bayeux by now, and knew that if he would rest for a night
in the old city he must make choice of a halting place. Casting,
therefore, his eyes round the wide streets, he saw an auberge--a
place, indeed, that in France is known as a _pant_--a low-roofed, poor
drinking place, yet with, inscribed upon its walls over the door, the
usual words, "_Logement a pied et a cheval._"

Around the door several scraggy chickens were picking up anything
they could find in the interstices of the stones, and two or three
gaunt half-starved-looking dogs lay about basking in the sun and
snapping at real or imaginary flies. The place looked none too clean.
Yet it was obscure, and it would