Her horse was sure, if heavy-footed and slow, and though a draught animal, was easy-paced; had it been otherwise, she was not a woman who could have ventured to ride over such a bit of country with a half-dead arm.  It was therefore nearly eight o’clock when she drew rein to breathe the mare on the last outlying high point of heath-land towards Casterbridge, previous to leaving Egdon for the cultivated valleys.

She halted before a pool called Rushy-pond, flanked by the ends of two hedges; a railing ran through the centre of the pond, dividing it in half.  Over the railing she saw the low green country; over the green trees the roofs of the town; over the roofs a white flat facade, denoting the entrance to the county jail.  On the roof of this front specks were moving about; they seemed to be workmen erecting something.  Her flesh crept.  She descended slowly, and was soon amid corn-fields and pastures.  In another half-hour, when it was almost dusk, Gertrude reached the White Hart, the first inn of the town on that side.

Little surprise was excited by her arrival; farmers’ wives rode on horseback then more than they do now; though, for that matter, Mrs. Lodge was not imagined to be a wife at all; the innkeeper supposed her some harum-skarum young woman who had come to attend ‘hang-fair’ next day.  Neither her husband nor herself ever dealt in Casterbridge market, so that she was unknown.  While dismounting she beheld a crowd of boys standing at the door of a harness-maker’s shop just above the inn, looking inside it with deep interest.

‘What is going on there?’ she asked of the ostler.

‘Making the rope for to-morrow.’

She throbbed responsively, and contracted her arm.

‘’Tis sold by the inch afterwards,’ the man continued.  ’I could get you a bit, miss, for nothing, if you’d like?’

She hastily repudiated any such wish, all the more from a curious creeping feeling that the condemned wretch’s destiny was becoming interwoven with her own; and having engaged a room for the night, sat down to think.

Up to this time she had formed but the vaguest notions about her means of obtaining access to the prison.  The words of the cunning-man returned to her mind.  He had implied that she should use her beauty, impaired though it was, as a pass-key.  In her inexperience she knew little about jail functionaries; she had heard of a high-sheriff and an under-sheriff; but dimly only.  She knew, however, that there must be a hangman, and to the hangman she determined to apply.

CHAPTER VIII—­A WATER-SIDE HERMIT

At this date, and for several years after, there was a hangman to almost every jail.  Gertrude found, on inquiry, that the Casterbridge official dwelt in a lonely cottage by a deep slow river flowing under the cliff on which the prison buildings were situate—­the stream being the self-same one, though she did not know it, which watered the Stickleford and Holmstoke meads lower down in its course.