"Lads," said he, "the night's foggy yet. You may slip away to your homes, if you go quiet. Step and tell the others, and send Malachi to me. I--I thank ye, friends, but, as you've been arguing to yourselves, the game's up; we won't stand another assault to-morrow." They filed out and left him, none asking--as Trevarthen would have asked-- concerning his own safety. By Trevarthen's body Malachi found him standing; and again, and in the same attitude, found him standing by it a quarter of an hour later, when, having muffled the horses' hoofs in straw, he returned to announce that all was ready, and the lane clear towards the moors. In so short a time the whole garrison had melted away. "He was my friend," said Roger again, looking down on the sheet, and wondered why this man had loved him. Indeed, there was no explanation except that Trevarthen had been just Trevarthen. He followed Malachi, wondering the while if he had ever thrown Trevarthen an affectionate word. Yet this man had cheerfully given up life for him, as he, Roger Stephen, was at this moment giving up more than life for a woman he hated. He walked forth from Steens, leading his horse softly. At the foot of the lane he mounted, looked back in the darkness, and lifted a fist against the sky. Then they headed eastward, and rode, Malachi and he, over the soundless turf and through the fog, breasting the moor together. A little after midnight, on the high ground, they reined up, straining their ears at a rumbling sound borne up to them from the valley road below--the sound (though they knew it not) of two cannon ploughing through the mire towards Steens. At eight o'clock next morning one of these guns opened fire, and with its first shot ripped a breach through the courtlage wall. There came no answer. When the Sheriff, taking courage, rode up to summon the house, its garrison consisted of two women and one sleeping babe. XVI. Four days later the fugitives were climbing a slope on the south-eastern fringe of Dartmoor. They mounted through a mist as dense almost as that in which they had ridden forth--a cloud resting on the hill's shoulder. But a very few yards above them the sky was blue, and to the south of them, had their eyes been able to pierce the short screen of vapour, the country lay clear for mile upon mile, away beyond Ashburton to Totnes, and beyond Totnes to Dartmouth and the Channel. Roger Stephen's face was yellow with disease and hunger; he could hardly sit in his saddle. He panted, and beads stood out on his forehead as though he felt every effort of his straining horse. Malachi's face was white but expressionless. Life had never promised him much, and for him the bitterness of death was easily passed. By-and-by, as a waft of wind lifted the cloud's ragged edge, his eyes sought the long slopes below, and then went up to a mass of dark granite topping the white cumulus above, and frowning over it out of the blue.