By this time Engel was standing at the door, with the dog at his heels ready for duty with his master. "When I have thought this thing well through I will come back and talk it over with you. It may be a couple of hours. It may be a great deal more. But I'll come, and if you are here, so much the better. Burn it into your mind, Herman Bengel, and you, William Roye, that we are going to get Master Tyndale out of that devil's den."
He went out, pulling the door after him noisily, and walked down the foot-beaten track. He halted before he had gone many yards, and, returning, opened the door again.
"Help yourselves to food when you feel hungry," he said, standing in the entrance with his hand on the latch. "There's no need for stint, since the larder's full enough. I may be away some time, for, if you don't mind, I'll take that horse back, and set him adrift in the field where you found him. It would be awkward for me if they found him in my stable. Shall I do that?"
Herman nodded.
The forester had more to say.
"Put the bolts in the door to keep intruders out. I don't want any of my friends yonder to come and find you here." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the castle. "They come sometimes for a chat, and so I get to know things. If any of them come, keep quiet, and don't open the door. They'll think I'm on my rounds."
He stalked away to the stable, and Herman, as soon as he saw him ride past the window on the borrowed horse, drove in the bolt.
The hours went slowly, and to those who were shut up in the forest hut, compelled to be idle, they seemed interminable. They talked over the possibilities at which Otto Engel had hinted so confidently, but in the slow passing of the hours they began to grow hopeless over Tyndale's affairs. They speculated as to what the forester might be able to do, but their own memory of the drawbridge and portcullis, and the armed men on the walls, drove them to the conclusion that his scheme was a wild and impossible one.
Again and again Herman went to the window, and looked out to the forest, hoping to see the forester, but there was no sign of his coming. He saw the giant trees rearing their proud heads to the sun, which at some spots found its way on the pathways and undergrowth. Some wild boars rushed by at odd intervals, and a dark-grey, grizzled lynx chased a poor creature among the branches, or dropped to the earth on an unsuspecting victim. It served to pass the time to watch from the window all that went on in the forest—the wolves that passed, or a bear that shambled along, but halted at an ant-hill to scrape out the nests and lap up the eggs.
But the all-absorbing matters were those two—the rescue of William Tyndale, and Margaret, who in less than a week was to be his wife. He shivered at the thought of her journey through the cavern, with its loneliness and those tokens of death from which she had shrunk even in his company. What must she have felt when she was moving in the cavern alone?