and fifty of them, came after us on their
light horses, and ever we doubled and crouched over the snow, like hares
hungered or hunted. At night we would make fires of the pine-cones, and
in our helmets melt the snow into water, lowering our helmets into the
snow again to cool them afterwards. We had eaten all our bread, but of
fish we had plenty, though I was sorry for my lord. So all that day we
hastened, and when the night came we lay back to back in a hollow of the
snow on a little hill that looked over a bay. The bay was frozen, and I
remember the winter moonlight kept me awake as it shed itself upward
from the ice into my face; and whenever I looked out over the
snow-sweep, its long white track seemed to point to where we lay. Deep
into the night, when the sighing wind had ceased to scud the drift-snow
into our hiding-place, my lord turned over and shook me feebly. "Man!"
he said; "he was right when he said the Church was born militant, and
that only a greater power like itself shall cast a shadow on men. We
broken clans, that call ourselves nations, are little things. What shall
I do? Tell me, what shall I do?" I looked at him in the surprise of one
just waking, as he knelt above me, one hand on each shoulder. "Man!" he
said, again, shaking me, "what shall I do? They are coming; I can hear
them under the snow. I can hear the ice of the bay cracking to their
boats, and I can hear the whispered warnings of the pine trees when they
bend to the stirred air of their innumerable breaths. Man! what shall I
do?" Awake now, I saw that my lord was full of terror, like a child, and
bringing him close to me, I rolled him in his clothes and put him deep
in the snow again, piling some of my own things over him, and he slept
complainingly and fitfully like a child who has been punished.

It was just before the dawn when we heard the far-away shouting of the
Bishop's noisy troop, and crawling to our feet we left our hole in the
snow and crept down the side of the hill toward the water. Here my lord
thought it was easier walking on the ice, but soon we heard the sound of
horses on the strand, and as it was a road to them not like the snow
above, we climbed again to where the deeper drifts were and passed
unseen. So half that day we travelled, and twice they went ahead of us
going by the strand, but both times a few horsemen only; so we dared not
turn back, for we knew the others were spread out on the uplands. Late
in the afternoon