ore upon our feet."

It was nearly an hour before the vessel was sufficiently deserted by the
ebbing sea; and they could set forth for the land, which appeared dimly
before them through a veil of driving snow.

Upon a hillock on one side of their way a party of men lay huddled
together, suspiciously observing the movements of the new arrivals.

"They might draw near and offer us some comfort," Dick remarked.

"Well, an' they come not to us, let us even turn aside to them," said
Hawksley. "The sooner we come to a good fire and a dry bed the better
for my poor lord."

But they had not moved far in the direction of the hillock, before the
men, with one consent, rose suddenly to their feet, and poured a flight
of well-directed arrows on the shipwrecked company.

"Back! back!" cried his lordship. "Beware, in Heaven's name, that ye
reply not."

"Nay," cried Greensheve, pulling an arrow from his leather jack. "We are
in no posture to fight, it is certain, being drenching wet, dog-weary,
and three-parts frozen; but, for the love of old England, what aileth
them to shoot thus cruelly on their poor country people in distress?"

"They take us to be French pirates," answered Lord Foxham. "In these
most troublesome and degenerate days we cannot keep our own shores of
England; but our old enemies, whom we once chased on sea and land, do now
range at pleasure, robbing and slaughtering and burning. It is the pity
and reproach of this poor land."

The men upon the hillock lay, closely observing them, while they trailed
upward from the beach and wound inland among desolate sand-hills; for a
mile or so they even hung upon the rear of the march, ready, at a sign,
to pour another volley on the weary and dispirited fugitives; and it was
only when, striking at length upon a firm high-road, Dick began to call
his men to some more martial order, that these jealous guardians of the
coast of England silently disappeared among the snow. They had done what
they desired; they had protected their own homes and farms, their own
families and cattle; and their private interest being thus secured, it
mattered not the weight of a straw to any one of them, although the
Frenchmen should carry blood and fire to every other parish in the realm
of England.

BOOK IV--THE DISGUISE

CHAPTER I--THE DEN

The place where Dick had struck the line of a high-road was not far from
Holywood, and within nine or ten miles of Shoreby-on-the-Til