Without turning to the right or left, he went direct to the common gaol.  There, in the cell which Ralph had occupied between the first trial and the second one, Mark Garth, the perjurer, lay imprisoned.

“You hell-hound,” cried the sheriff, grasping him by the hair and dragging him into the middle of the floor.  “I have found out your devilish treachery,” he said, speaking between gusts of breath.  “Did you not tell me that it was Ray who struck me this blow—­this” (beating with his palm the scar on his brow)?  “It was a lie—­a damned lie!”

“It was,” said the man, glaring back, with eyes afire with fury.

“And did you not say it was Ray who carried me into their camp—­an insensible prisoner?”

“That was a lie also,” the man gasped, never struggling to release himself from the grip that held him on the floor.

“And did you not set me on to compass the death of this man, but for whom I should now myself be dead?”

“You speak with marvellous accuracy, Master Lawson,” returned the perjurer.

The sheriff looked down at him for a moment, and then flung him away.

“Man, man! do you know what you have done?” he cried in an altered tone.  “You have charged my soul with your loathsome crime.”

The perjurer curled his lip.

“It was I who gave you that blow,” he said, with a cruel smile, pointing with his thin finger at the sheriff’s forehead.  It was false.

“You devil!” cried the sheriff, “and you have killed the man who saved your brother’s life, and consorted with one of two who would have been his murderers.”

“I was myself the second,” said the man, with fiendish calmness.  It was the truth.  “I carry the proof of it here,” he added, touching a place at the back of his head where the hair, being shorn away, disclosed a deep mark.

The sheriff staggered back with frenzied eyes and dilated nostrils.  His breast heaved; he seemed unable to catch his breath.

The man looked at him with a mocking smile struggling over clinched teeth.  As if a reptile had crossed his path, Wilfrey Lawson turned about and passed out without another word.

He returned to the castle and ascended the Donjon tower.

“Tell me how you became possessed of the warrant,” he said.  “Tell me, I beg of you, for my soul’s sake as well as for your life’s sake.”

Ralph shook his head.

“It is not even yet too late.  I shall take horse instantly for Newcastle.”

Sim had crept up, and, standing behind Ralph, was plucking at his jerkin.

Ralph turned about and looked wistfully into the old man’s face.  For an instant his purpose wavered.

“For the love of God,” cried the sheriff, “for your own life’s sake, for this poor man’s sake, by all that is near and dear to both, I charge you, if you are an innocent man, give me the means to prove you such.”