It was safe to thread a way among huge trees and tall ferns and young saplings.  It was not always easy but it was safe.  Sometimes they saw a charcoal-burner’s hut or a shelter where a shepherd was hiding with the few sheep left to him.  Each man they met wore the same look of stony suffering in his face; but, when the boys begged for bread and water, as was their habit, no one refused to share the little he had.  It soon became plain to them that they were thought to be two young fugitives whose homes had probably been destroyed and who were wandering about with no thought but that of finding safety until the worst was over.  That one of them traveled on crutches added to their apparent helplessness, and that he could not speak the language of the country made him more an object of pity.  The peasants did not know what language he spoke.  Sometimes a foreigner came to find work in this small town or that.  The poor lad might have come to the country with his father and mother and then have been caught in the whirlpool of war and tossed out on the world parent-less.  But no one asked questions.  Even in their desolation they were silent and noble people who were too courteous for curiosity.

“In the old days they were simple and stately and kind.  All doors were open to travelers.  The master of the poorest hut uttered a blessing and a welcome when a stranger crossed his threshold.  It was the custom of the country,” Marco said.  “I read about it in a book of my father’s.  About most of the doors the welcome was carved in stone.  It was this—­’The Blessing of the Son of God, and Rest within these Walls.’”

“They are big and strong,” said The Rat.  “And they have good faces.  They carry themselves as if they had been drilled—­both men and women.”

It was not through the blood-drenched part of the unhappy land their way led them, but they saw hunger and dread in the villages they passed.  Crops which should have fed the people had been taken from them for the use of the army; flocks and herds had been driven away, and faces were gaunt and gray.  Those who had as yet only lost crops and herds knew that homes and lives might be torn from them at any moment.  Only old men and women and children were left to wait for any fate which the chances of war might deal out to them.

When they were given food from some poor store, Marco would offer a little money in return.  He dare not excite suspicion by offering much.  He was obliged to let it be imagined that in his flight from his ruined home he had been able to snatch at and secrete some poor hoard which might save him from starvation.  Often the women would not take what he offered.  Their journey was a hard and hungry one.  They must make it all on foot and there was little food to be found.  But each of them knew how to live on scant fare.  They traveled mostly by night and slept among the ferns and undergrowth through the day.  They drank from running brooks and bathed in them.  Moss and ferns made soft and sweet-smelling beds, and trees roofed them.  Sometimes they lay long and talked while they rested.  And at length a day came when they knew they were nearing their journey’s end.