“Yes—but the horse.” “We could leave him on this side for the night.” She stared at the gate-house. “Perhaps. But we shall want a bridge that can be drawn in, to keep out chance visitors. The gate, too, is off its hinges, and broken. I know where a beam is hidden, but I doubt whether we can lift it.” “There is the rope—and I am strong.” Her eyes looked him over with critical praise. “Yes, you are bigger than your father. If we could throw a couple of young ash trees across the first gulf. There is a thicket of ashes down yonder.” Martin needed no second word from her. He had the tools off the horse’s back, and the ax on his shoulder. “Which way?” “Over there. I’ll take the billhook and lop off the boughs while you do the felling.” They started away like a couple of children, full of the adventure, and Martin was soon at work in a thicket of ash trees that had been planted some twenty years before. He chose a tree and had it down with six clean, slanting blows of the ax, so that the cuts clove wedgewise into the trunk. “Oh, brave man! That was woodman’s skill.” She fell to clearing the trunk of its top and side branches while Martin threw a second tree. He felled four, and shouldered them one by one up to the bridge end, and here his great strength served. These ash spars were no broomsticks, and he had to spear them forward over the gap, and keep their ends from dropping into the water. “Brave comrade! Well done!” She cheered his triumph. “And now a few willow withies.” He took the bill, lopped off some willow boughs, and then, straddling his way along the ash trunks, lashed them together with the withies. The thing made a very passable bridge. Martin tested it, and was happy. “A few more trees, and some earth rammed on the top, and the horse will be safe across.” “Yes—to-morrow. It is growing late. Now for the beam I told you of.” It was lying in the sluice ditch under a smother of brambles and young thorns, a great balk of timber all sodden with damp, fifteen feet long, six inches thick, and a foot in breadth. Two men might have shirked carrying it twenty yards; but Martin, in that springtime of his love, dragged it out upon the grass. “Good saints, but you are strong!” She tossed him the rope. “Throw a noose around it. I can help at pulling.” They got the beam to the bridge, across the platform of ash trees, and so to the place where the drawbridge should have been, and here the business baffled them. The thing was far too ponderous to be thrust across like a plank. Martin solved the riddle. He had to fell two more small trees, lay them across, and straddle his way over. Then he climbed the stair to the broken gate-house and bade Mellis throw him the rope. The first two casts failed, but the third succeeded. They swung the great beam across between them, Martin keeping his end raised by straining the rope over the wall.