"Reason? Law, logic, and the Switzers can be hired to fight for any man, they say. 'Tis true, in any event, of the law. I've seen the learned men in wigs wringing a poor man's withers and shaping the halter to his neck."
They had talked breathlessly at long intervals in their hasty flight, and thus talking they had come out of the town and up from the valley; nor would Martin stay to rest till from the southern hill that had given them their first prospect of Bristol city they looked back upon the houses and the river and the ships. Martin breathed more easily then and mopped his forehead and sat down until his wildly beating heart was quieter.
"To Bideford we must go, after all," said he, "and 'twere better by far had we never turned from the straight road."
"I am of no mind to go farther," Phil replied, looking back. "There will be more vessels sailing out of Bristol than out of Bideford. A man can choose in which to go."
Martin gulped and rubbed his throat. "Nay, I'll not hear to it. Daniel went but once into the lion's den."
He sighed mightily as he thought of begging his long way through Somerset and Devon, for he was a big heavy man and lazy and short of wind; but he would not go back, though he refused to speak further of his reason for it; and Phil, though in truth he liked Martin little, was too easy-going to part thus with his companion of the road. The lad was young, and the world was wide, and it was still spring in England.
So they turned toward the hills, which were blue and purple in the setting sun,—a shepherd, did he but know it, lives in halls more splendid than a king's,—and set forth upon their journey through the rough lands of Somerset. They went astray among the mines but found their way to Wells where, as they came out from the town, they passed a gallows, which gave Martin such a start that he stopped for neither breath nor speech until he had left that significant emblem of the law a mile behind him. They went through Glastonbury, where report has it that Joseph of Arimathea and King Arthur and King Edgar lie buried, and through Bridgewater, where to their wonder there was a ship of a hundred tons riding in the Parret. They went through Dulverton on a market day, and crossed the Dunsbrook by the stone bridge and so passed into Devon. They went on over heath and hill and through woods and green valleys until at the end of seven days from Bristol—for time and again they had lost their way, and a sailor on shore is at best like a lame horse on a rough road—they crossed the Taw at Barnstable. Again going astray, they went nearly to Torrington before they learned their blunder and turned down the valley of the Torridge. But all things come to an end at last, and one pleasant evening they crossed the ancient bridge built on stately Gothic arches into the populous town of Bideford.
At the river front there lay a street the better part of a mile long, in which were the custom house and a great quay, and there they saw ships of good burden loading and unloading in the very bosom of the town, as the scribe hath it. Thither Phil would have gone straightly but Martin shook his head. So turning up from the river, they passed another long street, where the houses of wealthy merchants stood, and this, too, Martin hastened quickly by. He shot glances to one side and the other as if fearing lest he see faces that he knew, and led his companion by an obscure way, as night was falling, to a cottage whence a dim light shone through a casement window.
Standing on the rough doorstone under the outcropping thatch, which projected beyond the line of the eaves to shield the door from rain, he softly knocked. There was no answer, no sound, but the door presently moved ajar as if by its own will.
"Who knocks?" an old woman whispered. "'Tis that dark I cannot see thy face."