Once clear of the first village beyond Tamworth he entered a stretch of woodland, where the black tips of the trees showed vivid against the starless gray sky. Below, the undergrowth was all dense darkness and Hugh thought it well to keep a hand on his pistol, for he was drawing into Puritan country where a Cavalier was fair game for an ambuscade. Out beyond he trotted again through fields, only blacker and lonelier now than those by Tamworth. Such cottages as he passed were silent and dark; at one farmstead he heard a dog howl, and once, in a tangled hollow, a bat whizzed by his head, but he saw or heard no other living thing. Though once, as he gazed across the fields on his left, he made out in the distance a gleam of light; a farm must lie yonder, and he pictured to himself the low cottage chamber, where the goodwife would be watching with a restless child. Such shelter and companionship was betokened by the light that he turned in the saddle to gaze at it till a clump of trees shut it from him. It must have been something after midnight, though under that starless sky he could not tell the time surely, when he clattered into a considerable town. An officious watchman with a bobbing torch ran from a byway, calling on him to stand, so Hugh clapped spurs to The Jade and shot through the street at such a pace that the next watchman could only get out of his course without trying to stay him. But after that he grew wary and, when the outlying houses of the next town came out of the black, turned off into the fields and picked his way about it. The round-about course saved him from interference, but it took much time; by a dull, unbraced feeling, that was not sleepiness nor yet quite weariness alone, he knew he had been many hours in the saddle, and he began to look to the east, in dread lest he catch the first signs of daybreak. Presently he must give his whole attention to The Jade, for they spattered into a ford where the going was treacherous. While she halted to drink he gazed about at the bushes and the field before him, and, spite of the dark, knew the place. It was home country he was drawing toward now, so he trotted on slowly, with his senses alert and his eyes peering into the dusk for the landmarks that should guide him. So it was that at last on his right hand he caught sight of a big leafless oak, beneath which he pulled up short. True enough, he remembered the way in which the tree stood up bare and alone with scragged common at its back; he could not see well for the dark, but he knew that at the farther edge of the open land was a belt of young oaks that hid the ford of Blackwater.