old enough to estimate the virulence of envy, to take ingratitude and
treachery for granted. He was to learn the lesson then, as a wholesome
chastener to the pride of success. He was to learn it again in later
years, as an additional bitterness in the humiliation of defeat; and find
out, as does many a man, that if he once fall, or seem to fall, a hundred
curs spring up to bark at him, who dared not open their mouths while he
was on his legs.

So they rode into the forest, and parted, each with his footman and his
dogs, in search of boar and deer; and each had his sport without meeting
again for some two hours or more.

Hereward and Martin came at last to a narrow gully, a murderous place
enough. Huge fir-trees roofed it in, and made a night of noon. High banks
of earth and great boulders walled it in right and left for twenty feet
above. The track, what with pack-horses' feet, and what with the wear and
tear of five hundred years' rain-fall, was a rut three feet deep and two
feet broad, in which no horse could turn. Any other day Hereward would
have cantered down it with merely a tightened rein. Today he turned to
Martin and said,--

"A very fit and proper place for this same treason, unless you have been
drinking beer and thinking beer."

But Martin was nowhere to be seen.

A pebble thrown from the right bank struck him, and he looked up. Martin's
face was peering through the heather overhead, his finger on his lips.
Then he pointed cautiously, first up the pass, then down.