What this obscure threat might portend, I could not see, but it chimed in with the delirious cruelty of the dead sergeant. Threats for the future mattered not, the present being so unendurable. A man in Brocton's position must be hard put to it to turn traitor in this strange fashion. He had "rescued" me with his own men, and, lord or no lord, he would hang for it were it once known to a lover of the gibbet like the Duke's Grace of Cumberland. What on earth was the letter about? Master Freake had definitely said lands, and therefore lands it must be, though nothing less than the whole Ridgeley estates could be in question. The thousand and more acres of the Upper Hanyards, sweet meadows stretching a mile along the river and a snatch of the chase at its wildest and loveliest, the prize that had fallen to the rascal earl in the great lawsuit, had been promised me as readily as a pinch of snuff. I gloated over the revenge I was winning for my race, a race rooted in those darling Hanyards a century before the Ridgeleys were heard of, for the first earl, the grandfather of the old rogue, started as an obscure pimp to Charles the Second, and was enriched and ennobled for his assiduity. But no familiary pride could cheer me for long. The dead landscape around chilled me. The chiefest misery was to remember the hope with which I had started that morning. Margaret was the fancied end of my journey, and the real end was this! I had to bite my lips till I felt the trickle of blood in the stubble on my chin to keep back unmanly revilings. At last we came out on what was by comparison a made road, and now his lordship grew plainly anxious and haggard. We rode madly along it, so that, riding shackled and woman-fashion, I had hard work to keep my seat. Brocton's head was incessantly on the turn to see if we were observed, but his luck was absolute. We saw no one on the road, and, after a hard stretch, we turned up a gully to our left and were once more buried among the hills. After much turning and twisting we came in sight of a small house of grey stone which, from its appearance and situation, I judged to be some gentleman's shooting lodge. We cut across the valley, on one slope of which it stood, and I caught a glimpse of cottage roofs beyond it. We worked round to the rear of the house, and, in a favouring clump of trees, his lordship called a halt. The horses were tethered, and I was lifted down, and the rings round my ankles were unlocked. The men took one each, and carried their carbines in their free hands. Brocton drew his rapier, and said, "Forward! Make a sound, show the slightest sign of resistance, and I run you through."