CHAPTER VI
THE WEDDING NIGHT
Furnum Regis, or the King’s Oven, is a wild and lonely spot lying beneath a cairn-crested hill of mid Dartmoor. Here in centuries past was practised the industry of tin-smelting, and to the present time a thousand decaying evidences of that vanished purpose still meet the eye. The foundations of ruins are yet apparent in a chaos of shattered stone; broken pounds extend their walls into the waste around about; hard by a mine once worked, and much stone from the King’s Oven was removed for the construction of buildings which are to-day themselves in ruins. Now the fox breeds in this fastness, and only roaming cattle or the little ponies have any business therein. A spot better adapted for the bestowal of stolen property could hardly be conceived.
Three hundred yards from the entrance of the Oven, Daniel stopped the trap and the men alighted.
“I must get two of the rocks in line with the old stones ’pon top the hill,” said Daniel. “That done, I know where to set you fellows digging.”
They proceeded as he directed. Corder walked on one side of the prisoner and Gregory upon the other; while Luke Bartley, with two spades and a pickaxe on his shoulder, came behind them.
The moon now rose and the darkness lifted. Sweetland walked about for some time until a certain point arrested him. This rock, after some shifting of their position, he presently brought into line with another, and then it seemed that both were hidden by the towering top of the cairn that rose into the moonlight beyond them.
“Here we are,” he said. “An’ first you’ve got to shift this here gert boulder. It took three men to turn it over and then pull it back into its place; an’ it will ax for all you three can do to treat it likewise.”
The rope was brought, and with the help of the mighty Corder a large block of granite was dragged out of its bed. The naked earth spread beneath.
“You’ll find solid stone for two feet,” declared Daniel, “for we filled up with soil an’ granite, an’ trampled all so hard an’ firm as our feet could do it. The hole we dug goes two feet down; then it runs under thicky rock to the left.”