"Do you think that they have discovered the plan, and that he—Polaris—is taken again? I pray to God that is not so," whispered Rose.
"Something has greatly stirred the guards," Memene replied. "But I do not think that the mighty man of the wilderness and his red friend are taken. Those shouts we heard but now were those of disappointed men."
As the uproar continued through the rooms of the old prison, Rose and Memene arose and donned their garments. Sleep, for that night, had fled them.
Presently they heard, but faint and muffled through the intervening walls, the clatter of hoofs on the pavement of the black avenue as a horse passed by, ridden at furious speed.
A little later the door from the corridor outside the hall of audience was opened, and through it came that captain of the palace-guard who was named Brunar. From Oleric, the captain had learned a few words of the English tongue, and he now made shift with them to tell the two fair prisoners that Polaris and Oleric, and likewise the captain, Mordo, had gone. The escape of Zenas Wright and Everson had not been discovered as yet. Two dead guards in the rooms of Mordo, and the absence of the marizel from its moorings in the hidden canal near the Temple of the Sun, accounted for part of the story. A rider on the fleetest horse in the stables of Bel-Ar, said Brunar, had been sent to the harbor to warn the guards there, so they might trap the fugitives.
From the manner in which his news was received, the captain was able to guess that Rose and Memene knew something of what was on foot. But this Brunar was a very courteous man, and he forbore to question them closely, if indeed he had enough English to do so. In the morning he came again, and told them of the fight at the harbor and the sailing of the marizel; for Brunar now took up his abode in the palace of Bel-Tisam and looked after the duties of Mordo. His two wards found him a kindly jailer, and as indulgent as circumstances would permit him to be, who could not set them free. Brunar was angry indeed at the supposed treachery of Oleric and of Mordo, not knowing that the one was a spy of Ruthar and that the other had had no will in the manner of his going forth from Adlaz.
Report was made later in the day of the escape of Everson from the mines, and of Zenas Wright from the household of the king, and men marveled at the daring of the deed and the craft of it. But the two women in their prison, or Ensign Brooks in the mines, or Minos at the harbor, got no more news of the fugitives for many a long day.
With Urk, the sailor, squatting among the levers of his engine, the marizel of Oleric swam steadily and swiftly down the western coast of Maeronica. Under water she went, well off from the shore and showing no lights. Oleric showed his passengers the marvelous valves in the sides of the little vessel which were similar in construction to the mask with which they already were familiar, and by means of which the air in the marizel was replenished with oxygen drawn from the sea water.
Also, he told them somewhat of the land to which they were journeying, explaining why it was that Ruthar, though smaller and more sparsely populated by far than Maeronica, had never been conquered by the larger power. It was a land of forests and mountains, he said, and all the way around its ragged coastline were huge, precipitous cliffs, the overhanging crags of which were a natural barrier to invasion. Wherever had been a break in the cliff-line, the Rutharians, by dint of great labors, had filled the breaks with walls, closing the gaps so that the only places where one might land on Ruthar from the sea were certain spots where narrow stretches of beach lay at the foot of the towering cliffs.