e with a
face that matched his ruff in its sickly yellow colouring.

Chapter VII.

IN THE TOILS.

That afternoon the house of Captain Dawe was filled with visitors more
or less illustrious. The dignitaries of the forest and the river were
assembled in solemn conclave. The scare caused by the first rumours of
the Spanish plot was revived in tenfold magnitude. Morgan's wounded
arm was a mute witness to the daring and activity of the foe. The
knight and the forester could describe every lineament of the would-be
assassin. The yellow, parchment face, the spare, sinewy body clad in
black doublet and hosen, had been seen for a moment by many a forester.
And the woodland men, brimful of superstition, had already invested him
with supernatural powers.

A belated swineherd had gone in terror to his master with a story that
he had come upon the "men in black" dancing beneath an oak, enveloped
in blue flames, and that the smell of the "brimstone" had laid him on
the ground in a stupor from sunset to moonrise, more than an hour
after! The following day, in the early forenoon, he had led a
trembling party to the spot, and, sure enough, there was a blackened
circle in the bracken and the charred bark and singed leaves of the
tree to testify to the truth of his tale. Neither swineherd nor
shepherd nor forester had dared to pass the tree from that hour. The
woodsman's story was not all exaggeration. He had actually stumbled
upon the two villains, Basil and John, trying the kindling properties
of the bracken, and he had promptly fallen in a swoon from sheer
terror. By the common folk his account was believed _ad literam_, and
not all the better sort saw the true inwardness of the occurrence. So
the assembly had serious matter for thought and discussion.

The leaders saw the gravity of the situation, and their apprehensions
grew when they found that those who best knew the forest were becoming
rapidly infected with superstitious fears. As a race the Dean men were
brave and tenacious--centuries of border warfare had made them so--but
their very life amidst the gloom of the trees and the roaring of the
streams, their brains teeming with mythic tales of the dark, deep pools
and echoing caves, made them ready believers in the "uncanny." The
forest could only be guarded by those who knew its devious ways; the
number of such warders was limited. Now it would be impossible to get
any man to keep a lonely watch; sentine