"There is a secret way into the garden," I said, and then a new thought flashed in upon me. "It was doubtless by that way the soldiers came."
"No, sir," said Ashlock, "they came by the highroad. Else I should not have seen them."
"True," said I, "those soldiers did, but they are not all the soldiers in Cumberland. And this secret way—you know it?"
"I know it," he answered. "But we must reach the thicket first."
I looked backwards across my shoulder. The soldiers were spreading over the terrace. I turned my face and strained every muscle to help me forward. Each moment I expected to hear the clink of a sabre against a spur, and a voice cry "Halt," or to see a shadow fall from behind my shoulder across the grass in front. "I must not be taken," I said to myself, yet knew full well that I might, "I must not be taken." It was not so much the thought of my own peril that plagued me, but rather the desire to inform Mrs. Herbert that her husband was not dead. It pressed upon me like a sheer necessity. I must escape.
Ashlock at my side uttered a groan.
"I can go no further, Master Lawrence," he said, and lay prone in an extremity of exhaustion, his face purple, and the veins pulsing upon it "Were I ten years younger—but I cannot."
For answer I twined my arm about his body and dragged him forward. Every muscle in his body was a-quiver, the sweat poured from his forehead, and his chest heaved upon my arm as though it would crack; and all the while the screen of grass was close about our eyes and the sun burning upon our backs and heads. At last a shadow fell between the sun and us. I stopped with a groan and let my forehead fall forward on the ground. In a trice I saw myself captured, tried, executed, and meanwhile Mrs. Herbert would sit a-weeping in Keswick for a husband who was not dead.
"Thank God!" said Ashlock. "It is the shadow of the first tree."
I raised my head, just checking the cry of joy which sprang to my lips. A little to the left of us a great leafy branch stretched out towards us. We crawled forward again, past a tree-trunk, then another, then another, and in a minute I was standing up behind a shrub, and Ashlock was lying at my feet, his breath coming in hoarse gasps from between his parched lips, his eyes closed, and his whole body limp and broken.