At the risk of struggling a little longer like flies in that black web of twigs and trunks, Evan (who had an instinct of the hunter or the hunted) took an incalculable course through the forest, which let them out at last by a forest opening—­quite forgotten by the leaders of the chase.  They ran a mile or two farther along the edge of the wood until they reached another and somewhat similar opening.  Then MacIan stood utterly still and listened, as animals listen, for every sound in the universe.  Then he said:  “We are quit of them.”  And Turnbull said:  “Where shall we go now?”

MacIan looked at the silver sunset that was closing in, barred by plumy lines of purple cloud; he looked at the high tree-tops that caught the last light and at the birds going heavily homeward, just as if all these things were bits of written advice that he could read.

Then he said:  “The best place we can go to is to bed.  If we can get some sleep in this wood, now everyone has cleared out of it, it will be worth a handicap of two hundred yards tomorrow.”

Turnbull, who was exceptionally lively and laughing in his demeanour, kicked his legs about like a schoolboy and said he did not want to go to sleep.  He walked incessantly and talked very brilliantly.  And when at last he lay down on the hard earth, sleep struck him senseless like a hammer.

Indeed, he needed the strongest sleep he could get; for the earth was still full of darkness and a kind of morning fog when his fellow-fugitive shook him awake.

“No more sleep, I’m afraid,” said Evan, in a heavy, almost submissive, voice of apology.  “They’ve gone on past us right enough for a good thirty miles; but now they’ve found out their mistake, and they’re coming back.”

“Are you sure?” said Turnbull, sitting up and rubbing his red eyebrows with his hand.

The next moment, however, he had jumped up alive and leaping like a man struck with a shock of cold water, and he was plunging after MacIan along the woodland path.  The shape of their old friend the constable had appeared against the pearl and pink of the sunrise.  Somehow, it always looked a very funny shape when seen against the sunrise.

* * *

A wash of weary daylight was breaking over the country-side, and the fields and roads were full of white mist—­the kind of white mist that clings in corners like cotton wool.  The empty road, along which the chase had taken its turn, was overshadowed on one side by a very high discoloured wall, stained, and streaked green, as with seaweed—­evidently the high-shouldered sentinel of some great gentleman’s estate.  A yard or two from the wall ran parallel to it a linked and tangled line of lime-trees, forming a kind of cloister along the side of the road.  It was under this branching colonnade that the two fugitives fled, almost concealed from their pursuers by the twilight, the mist and the leaping zoetrope of shadows.  Their feet, though beating the ground furiously, made but a faint noise; for they had kicked away their boots in the wood; their long, antiquated weapons made no jingle or clatter, for they had strapped them across their backs like guitars.  They had all the advantages that invisibility and silence can add to speed.