ards Antrim.

Hope gave the word to march again, but Neal could carry the boy no more.

"I can't do it," he said. "We must stay here and take our chance."

"Go on," said the boy, "go you on. I've been a sore trouble to you the
day, have done with me now."

"I will not leave you," said Neal, "we'll take our chance together."

He watched Hope's little force disappear up the road. Then he dragged
the boy through the hedge into the meadow beyond it, and lay down in the
deep grass.

"Is your leg very bad?" said Neal.

"It's no that bad, only I canna walk. It's bled a power, my stocking's
soaked with the blood. Maybe if we could tie it up better we might stop
it and I'd get strength to go again."

Neal dragged the lining from his coat, and tore it into strips. He cut
the stocking from the boy's leg with his pocket-knife, and bandaged a
long flesh wound as best he could.

"Rest now," he said, "and after a while we'll try and get on a bit."

They lay in the deep, cool grass. There was pure air round them, and
they drew deep breaths of it into throats and lungs parched by the fumes
of sulphurous smoke. A delicious silence wrapped them, folded them as if
in a tender, kind embrace. A faint breeze stirred the grass, waved the
white plumes of the meadow sweet, shook the blue vetch flowers and the
purple spears of lusmor. In the hedge the reddening blooms of faded
hawthorn still lingered. The honeysuckle fragrance filled the air.
Groups of merry-faced dog-daisies nodded in the ditch, and round
their stalks were buttercups, and beyond them the rich yellow of marsh
marigolds. Neal fancied himself awaking from some hideous nightmare. It
became impossible to believe in the reality of the battle, the fierce
passion of it, the smoke, the sweat, the wounds, the cries. He was
lulled into delicious ease. Rest was for the time the supreme good of
life. His eyes closed drowsily. He was back in Dunseveric again, and in
his ears the noise of a gentle summer sea.

He was roused by a touch of his companion's hand.

"I'm afraid there's a wheen o' sogers coming up the road."

Neal rose to his hands and knees and peered cautiously through the
hedge. He saw mounted men riding slowly along the road from the
direction of Antrim. They were still about half a mile off. Every now
and then they halted and peered about them. They rode as if they feared
an ambush, or as if they sought something or some one in the fields at
each side of the road.