There they found children screaming and women wringing their hands.  In the high road lay articles of furniture, huddled together, thrown in heaps one on another, and broken into fragments in the fall.  A sergeant and company of musketeers were even then in the midst of this pitiful work of devastation, turning the people out of their little thatched cottages and flinging their poor sticks of property out after them.  Everywhere were tumult and ruin.  Old people were lying on the cold earth by the wayside.  They had been born in these houses; they had looked to die in these homes; but houses and homes were to be theirs no more.  Amidst the wreck strode the gaunt figure of a factor, directing and encouraging, and firing off meantime a volley of revolting oaths.

“What’s the name of this place?” asked Ralph of a man who stood, with fury in his eyes, watching the destruction of his home.

“Hollowbank,” answered the man between his teeth.

Ralph remembered that here had lived a well-known Royalist, whom the Parliament had dispossessed of his estates.  The people of this valley had been ardent Parliamentarians during the long campaign.  Could it be that his lordship had been repossessed of his property, and was taking this means of revenging himself upon his tenantry for resisting the cause he had fought for?

An old man lay by the hedge looking down to the ground with eyes that told only of despair.  A little fair-haired boy, with fear in his innocent face, was clinging to his grandfather’s cloak and crying piteously.

“Get off with you and begone!” cried the factor, rapping out another volley.

“Is it Hollowbank you call this place?” said Ralph, looking the fellow in the face.  “Hellbank would be a fitter name.”

The man answered nothing, but his eyes glared angrily as Ralph put spur to his horse and rode on.

“God in heaven!” cried Ralph when Sim had come up by his side, “to think that work like this goes on in God’s sight!”

“Yet you say the best happens,” said Sim.

“It does; it does; God knows it does, for all that,” insisted Ralph.  “But to think of these poor souls thrown out into the road like cattle.  Cattle?  To cattle they would be merciful!—­thrown out into the road to lie and die and rot!”

“Have they been outlawed—­these men?” said Sim.

“Damnation!” cried Ralph, as though at Sim’s ignorant word a new and terrible thought had flashed upon his mind and wounded him like a dagger.

Then they rode long in silence.

Away they went, mile after mile, without rest and without pause, through dales and over uplands, past meres and across rivers, and still with the gathering blackness overhead.

What force of doom was spurring them on in this race against Life?  It was the depth of a Cumbrian winter, and the days were short.  Clearly they would never reach Penrith to-night.  The delay at Hollowbank and the shortened twilight before a coming snowstorm must curtail their journey.  They agreed to put up for the night at the inn at Askham.