“Fool! The hoofs point onward there.”
“Ay,”—and the fellow could hardly hide a grin,—“but he had shod all his horses backwards.”
A storm of execration followed. They might be thrown twenty miles out of their right road by the stratagem.
“So you had seen Hereward, and would not tell. Put out his other eye,” said Taillebois, as a vent to his own feelings.
And they turned their horses’ heads, and rode back, leaving the man blind in the forest.
The day was waning now. The fog hung heavy on the treetops, and dripped upon their heads. The horses were getting tired, and slipped and stumbled in the deep clay paths. The footmen were more tired still, and, cold and hungry, straggled more and more. The horse-tracks led over an open lawn of grass and fern, with here and there an ancient thorn, and round it on three sides thick wood of oak and beech, with under copse of holly and hazel. Into that wood the horse-tracks led, by a path on which there was but room for one horse at a time.
“Here they are at last!” cried Ivo. “I see the fresh footmarks of men, as well as horses. Push on, knights and men at-arms.”
The Abbot looked at the dark, dripping wood, and meditated.
“I think that it will be as well for some of us to remain here; and, spreading our men along the woodside, prevent the escape of the villains. A moi, hommes d’armes!”
“As you like. I will go in and bolt the rabbit; and you shall snap him up as he comes out.”