the servant to draw nearer.

'Not I.'

'Then we must track them. If they dared not face Chippenham, they will
not venture through Devizes. It is possible that they are making for
Bristol by cross-roads. There is a bridge over the Avon near Laycock
Abbey, somewhere on our right, and a road that way through
Pewsey Forest.'

'That will be it,' cried Mr. Dunborough, slapping his thigh. 'That is
their game, depend upon it.'

Sir George did not answer him, but nodded to the servant. 'Go on with
the light,' he said. 'Try every turning for wheels, but lose no time.
This gentleman will accompany us, but I will wait on him.'

The man obeyed quickly, the lawyer going with him. The other two
brought up the rear, and in that order they started, riding in silence.
For a mile or more the servant held the road at a steady trot; then
signing to those behind him to halt, he pulled up at the mouth of a
by-road leading westwards from the highway. He moved the light once or
twice across the ground, and cried that the wheels had gone that way;
then got briskly to his saddle and swung along the lane at a trot, the
others following in single file, Sir George last.

So far they had maintained a fair pace. But the party had not proceeded
a quarter of a mile along the lane before the trot became a walk. Clouds
had come over the face of the moon; the night had grown dark. The riders
were no longer on the open downs, but in a narrow by-road, running
across wastes and through thick coppices, the ground sloping sharply to
the Avon. In one place the track was so closely shadowed by trees as to
be as dark as a pit. In another it ran, unfenced, across a heath studded
with water-pools, whence the startled moor-fowl squattered up unseen.
Everywhere they stumbled: once a horse fell. Over such ground,
founderous and scored knee-deep with ruts, it was plain that no wheeled
carriage could move at speed; and the pursuers had this to cheer them.
But the darkness of the night, the dreary glimpses of wood and water,
which met the eye when the moon for a moment emerged, the solitude of
this forest tract, the muffled tread of the horses' feet, the very
moaning of the wind among the trees, suggested ideas and misgivings
which Sir George strove in vain to suppress. Why had the scoundrels gone
this way? Were they really bound for Bristol? Or for some den of
villainy, some thieves' house in the old forest?

At times these fears stung him out of all patience, an