"No, let us not stay!" she exclaimed, taking her husband's hand, and by an effort which surprised him drawing herself on to her feet, where she stood with her hands on his arm. "Let us go forward. They will find that we have left our home, and they will say that we must have left the city; then they will come here to search for us."
Shuddering at the thought, and weak though she was, she drew her husband forward.
"Then you shall take my arm; or, better still, since I am fresh and Engel is not, I will carry you!" exclaimed Herman; and before she could say a word by way of protest, he had her frail body in his arms.
"Go ahead," he said, when Engel protested that he was equal to three or four miles more. "Show the way, since no one knows the forest as you do."
More than once, when the wind howled among the trees and made the going dangerous because great branches sometimes broke away and crashed to the ground, the travellers thought they heard the cries of men, and they paused to know whether they were being pursued. When an hour had gone, and Margaret's mother had twice changed bearers, the forester said they were nearing a farm where he thought he could hire some horses. He was going to point to a clearing where the house was standing when the sound of a horse's hoofs was heard, in spite of the swish of the forest leaves in the storm.
"They are after us!" said Margaret, in awestricken tones, and she looked around, dark though it was, to know if any place offered for their hiding.
"Come this way!" the forester exclaimed, and, having just given up his burden to Herman, he caught at Margaret's hand. He drew her, and the others followed, among the bushes, away from the road, and waited in hiding to know what the sounds meant.
The horse came on, regardless of the road, and in the darkness he was making for the bush behind which they waited. The creature came close to them, not seeing where he went in his evident terror, or else spurred on by his rider, but he stumbled at a hidden root, made doubly treacherous by the rain, and fell heavily. His rider crashed against a tree, and fell without a groan and lay still, while the horse, scrambling to his feet, dashed away into the darkness and was no more seen.
The forester ran to the rider, and, bending over him, lifted him in his arms; but he laid him down again.
"He is dead," he said quietly. "His neck is broken."