The captain, Captain Ritchie, was in sole command now. Certain scrupulous limitations inherent in the man, of which his acceptance of the parson’s word had been one, made him a less useful instrument than the late Jeremy Cope had been; but these apart, he did his work thoroughly. The district was immense, but as far as possible he encircled it. The Edge into Lancashire, ten miles away, was a sentry-beat, sentry meeting sentry every furlong. The Causeway was picketed three men to the mile, passing and returning; guards were changed four times a day; and on every Shelf and Scout and Ridge throughout Back o’ th’ Mooin men were posted as if for war. It took two days to enclose the country for beating; and the midday of the second day was the time appointed for the funeral of Sally Northrop, which was to take place in Wadsworth. Only a dozen folk saw Sally laid to rest; among them were Cicely and Dooina Benn. All the morning the bell tolled in the squat belfry that had baffled Pim o’ Cuddy’s pigeon, and at midday the parson came out of his house. All was over in an hour. There was no “arvill,” or funeral drinking; and those who had followed the bier set on back immediately for Horwick. Cicely and Dooina, both in their blacks, carried little Jimmy between them, and at a turn at the foot of the street, where for a moment the rest could not see them, Dooina kissed Cicely quickly and wiped her eyes. “So it won’t be me ’at does for ye, love,” she sobbed, and she carried Jimmy yet a little further. The road turned to pass down round Wadsworth Shelf, and again the two women dropped behind. In a few minutes Dooina rejoined the little party alone; and when a lad asked after Cicely, she sobbed and laughed and choked all at once, and answered him that he’d know more o’ women and life th’ longer he lived. They dropped to the Horwick valley. Cicely had left the road at the mouth of a narrow grassy gully that turned behind a fold of the hill to a small dean half a mile away. Far away a glimpse of the distant Holdsworth moors and rocky Soyland showed. Cicely had known the dean from her infancy; there was a hollow cavity in the sandy bank of a beck, overgrown with scrubby alder, that long ago had been her playing-hole, and it was there that she was to wait for Arthur. If possible, too, she was to sleep, for they would have to foot it during the night. In twenty minutes she was ascending the bleached stones of the dry bed of the stream, stepping carefully so as to make as little noise as possible; and then she found the alder, drew it aside, and crept into her retreat. She unburdened herself of a basket and a jar of milk, and stretched herself on the sand, Jimmy asleep in her arms.