“If you carry me off this spot, sir, you carry my corpse only,” said Parsons.  “I may as well die here as be hanged elsewhere, like my martyred brother Campian.”

“If you take him, you must take me too,” said Eustace.

“What if we won’t?”

“How will you gain by that? you can only leave me here.  You cannot make me go to the Gubbings, if I do not choose.”

Amyas uttered sotto voce an anathema on Jesuits, Gubbings, and things in general.  He was in a great hurry to get to Bideford, and he feared that this business would delay him, as it was, a day or two.  He wanted to hang Parsons, he did not want to hang Eustace; and Eustace, he knew, was well aware of that latter fact, and played his game accordingly; but time ran on, and he had to answer sulkily enough: 

“Well then; if you, Eustace, will go and give my message to your converts, I will promise to set Mr. Parsons free again before we come to Lydford town; and I advise you, if you have any regard for his life, to see that your eloquence be persuasive enough; for as sure as I am an Englishman, and he none, if the Gubbings attack us, the first bullet that I shall fire at them will have gone through his scoundrelly brains.”

Parsons still kicked.

“Very well, then, my merry men all.  Tie this gentleman’s hands behind his back, get the horses out, and we’ll right away up into Dartmoor, find a good high tor, stand our ground there till morning, and then carry him into Okehampton to the nearest justice.  If he chooses to delay me in my journey, it is fair that I should make him pay for it.”

Whereon Parsons gave in, and being fast tied by his arm to Amyas’s saddle, trudged alongside his horse for several weary miles, while Yeo walked by his side, like a friar by a condemned criminal; and in order to keep up his spirits, told him the woful end of Nicholas Saunders the Legate, and how he was found starved to death in a bog.

“And if you wish, sir, to follow in his blessed steps, which I heartily hope you will do, you have only to go over that big cow-backed hill there on your right hand, and down again the other side to Crawmere pool, and there you’ll find as pretty a bog to die in as ever Jesuit needed; and your ghost may sit there on a grass tummock, and tell your beads without any one asking for you till the day of judgment; and much good may it do you!”

At which imagination Yeo was actually heard, for the first and last time in this history, to laugh most heartily.

His ho-ho’s had scarcely died away when they saw shining under the moon the old tower of Lydford castle.

“Cast the fellow off now,” said Amyas.

“Ay, ay, sir!” and Yeo and Simon Evans stopped behind, and did not come up for ten minutes after.

“What have you been about so long?”

“Why, sir,” said Evans, “you see the man had a very fair pair of hose on, and a bran-new kersey doublet, very warm-lined; and so, thinking it a pity good clothes should be wasted on such noxious trade, we’ve just brought them along with us.”