“Very well. If you slip a spade and a pick or two in the trap afore we start, ’twill be all the better. An’ a bit of rope, for that matter. Us have got our work cut out,” answered the prisoner. “What they Londoners will say to me for turning traitor, I don’t know; an’ I don’t care now neither,” he added. “You won’t give ’em up?” “Not the men. Only the stuff--for my wife’s sake.” Bartley brought the trap to the door, and as Sweetland was helped in, Mr Beer and his wife drove up in their little market cart. The police said nothing, and soon they were on their way again, but not before Johnny Beer had spoken to his friend. “Keep a cheerful face in this terrible case. Us’ll do all we can for our old pal, Dan. To think of the tragedy on your wedding day! It have so got hold upon me that I’ve made tragical rhymes upon it all the way back from Moreton. Please God, I’ll get the chance to tell ’em to ’e some day.” “I hope you will, Johnny, though it don’t look very likely.” The trap drove off. Its lamps were lighted, and they cast a bright blaze forward into a dark night. Presently Daniel stopped them, and Bartley jumped down and took the horse’s head. “Now keep over the grass track to the right an’ us will be in King’s Oven in ten minutes,” said Sweetland. Swaying and jolting, their dog-cart proceeded into the great central silence and stillness of the Moor. CHAPTER VI THE WEDDING NIGHT Furnum Regis, or the King’s Oven, is a wild and lonely spot lying beneath a cairn-crested hill of mid Dartmoor. Here in centuries past was practised the industry of tin-smelting, and to the present time a thousand decaying evidences of that vanished purpose still meet the eye. The foundations of ruins are yet apparent in a chaos of shattered stone; broken pounds extend their walls into the waste around about; hard by a mine once worked, and much stone from the King’s Oven was removed for the construction of buildings which are to-day themselves in ruins. Now the fox breeds in this fastness, and only roaming cattle or the little ponies have any business therein. A spot better adapted for the bestowal of stolen property could hardly be conceived. Three hundred yards from the entrance of the Oven, Daniel stopped the trap and the men alighted. “I must get two of the rocks in line with the old stones ’pon top the hill,” said Daniel. “That done, I know where to set you fellows digging.” They proceeded as he directed. Corder walked on one side of the prisoner and Gregory upon the other; while Luke Bartley, with two spades and a pickaxe on his shoulder, came behind them. The moon now rose and the darkness lifted. Sweetland walked about for some time until a certain point arrested him. This rock, after some shifting of their position, he presently brought into line with another, and then it seemed that both were hidden by the towering top of the cairn that rose into the moonlight beyond them.