Efforts were made immediately to track the assassins by the slot, several, both of the men-at-arms and of the Yorkshire foresters, being expert at the art; but their skill was at fault, as well as the scent of the slow-hounds, which were laid on the trail; for, within a few hundred yards of the spot, the party had entered the channel of the river Idle, and probably followed its course upward, to a place where it flowed over a sheet of hard, slaty, rock; and where the land farther back consisted of a dry, sun-burned, upland waste, of short, summer-parched turf, which took no impression of the horses' hoofs. There was no proof, nor any distinct circumstantial evidence; yet none doubted any more than if they had beheld the doing of the dastardly deed, that the good Lord de Morville had fallen by the hand of Sir Foulke d'Oilly and of his associates in blood-shedding. For the rest, the good knight lay dead, leaving no child, wife, brother, nor any near relation, who should inherit either his honors or his lands. He had left neither testament nor next of kin. Literally, he had died, and made no sign. The offices of the church were done duly, the masses were chanted over the dead, and the last remains of the good knight were consigned to dust in the chapel vaults of his ancestral castle, never to descend to posterity of his, or to bear his name again forever. In a few days it was made known that Sir Philip had died deeply indebted to the Jews of York, of Tadcaster, even of London; that his estates, all of which were unentailed and in his own right, were heavily mortgaged; and that the lands would be sold to satisfy the creditors of the deceased. Shortly after, it was whispered abroad, and soon proclaimed aloud, that Sir Foulke d'Oilly had become purchaser of whatever was saleable, and had been confirmed by the royal mandate in the possession of the seigneurial and feudal rights of the lapsed fief of Waltheofstow. There had been none to draw attention to the suspicions which weighed so heavily against Sir Foulke in the neighborhood, and among the followers of the dead knight; they were men of small rank and no influence, and had no motive to induce them wantonly to incur the hatred of the most powerful and unscrupulous noble of the vicinity, by bringing charges which they had no means to substantiate, if true, and which, to disprove, it was probable that he had contrivances already prepared by false witness.