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, and he cried to the man with the light to go faster, faster!  Again, the whole seemed unreal, and the shadowy woods and gleaming water-pools, the stumbling horses, the fear, the danger, grew to be the creatures of a disordered fancy.  It was an immense joy to him when, at the end of an hour, the lawyer cried, ‘The road! the road!’ and one by one the riders emerged with grunts of relief on a sound causeway.  To make sure that the pursued had nowhere evaded them, the tracks of the chaise-wheels were sought and found, and forward the four went again.  Presently they plunged through a brook, and this passed, were on Laycock bridge before they knew it, and across the Avon, and mounting the slope on the other side by Laycock Abbey.

There were houses abutting on the road here, black overhanging masses against a grey sky, and the riders looked, wavered, and drew rein.  Before any spoke, however, an unseen shutter creaked open, and a voice from the darkness cried, ‘Hallo!’

Sir George found speech to answer.  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘what is it?’ The lawyer was out of breath, and clinging to the mane in sheer weariness.

‘Be you after a chaise driving to the devil?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Sir George answered eagerly.  ‘Has it passed, my man?’

’Ay, sure, Corsham way, for Bath most like, I knew ’twould be followed.  Is’t a murder, gentlemen?’

‘Yes,’ Sir George cried hurriedly, ‘and worse!  How far ahead are they?’

’About half an hour, no more, and whipping and spurring as if the old one was after them.  My old woman’s sick, and the apothecary from—­’

‘Is it straight on?’

’Ay, to be sure, straight on—­and the apothecary from Corsham, as I was saying, he said, said he, as soon as he saw her—­’