This man was out daily, seeking news with the rest; and one day, just a week after we had come to Cannington, when the frost had bound everything fast again, he came home and sought his master.

Heregar and I and Osmund sat together silently before the fire, and he looked from one to the other of us outlanders.

“Speak out, Dudda,” said Heregar, who knew his ways; “here are none but friends.”

“Ay, friends of ours sure enough; but are they the king’s?”

“Most truly so.  Have you news of him?”

“I have not; but I have heard some fenmen talking.”

Then Osmund rose up and went his way silently, as was his wont; and Dudda grinned at us.

“He is a good Dane,” he said; “now I can speak.  They say there is some great lord hiding in the fens beyond the round hill where Tone and Parret join, that we call the Stane—­somewhere by Long Hill, they say.  Now I mind that one day when the king rode with you across the Petherton heights, he looked out over all the fens, and called me and asked much of them.  And when I told him what he would, he said, ’Here is a place where a man might lie hid from all the world if he chose.’  So he laughed, and we rode on.”

“I mind it,” said Heregar; “but it was many years ago.”

“I think he may be there, for our king weighs his words, and does not forget.  I held his horse at your door in Chippenham the other day, and he spoke to me by name, and put me in mind of little things for which he had laughed at me in those same old days.  He is a good king.”

So said Dudda, the rough housecarl; and it is in my mind that the kindly remembrance would have wiped out many a thought of wrong, had there been any.  That is a kingly gift to remember all, and no king has ever been great who has not had it; for it binds every man to his prince when he knows that aught he has done is not forgotten, so it be good to recall.

So it came to pass that next day, very early, we rode away, taking Harek and Kolgrim and this man Dudda with us, well armed and mounted and full of hope, across the southward ridge that looks down over the fens of the meeting of Tone and Parret, where they are widest and wildest.  No Danes had crossed them yet, and when I saw what they were like I thought that they never could do so.

And as I looked at the long chains of ice-bound meres and pools that ran among dense thickets of alder and wide snow-covered stretches of peat bogs, it seemed that we might search in vain for one who would hide among them.  Only the strange round hill on Stanmoor seemed to be a point that might be noted on all the level, though Dudda told us that there were many islets hidden in the wooded parts.

We went to the lower hills and then to the very edge of the fenland, skirting along it, and asking here and there of the cottagers if they knew of any folk in hiding in the islets.  But though we heard of poor people in one or two places, none of them knew of any thane; and the day wore on, and hope began to grow dim, save for Dudda’s certainty that what he had heard was true.