Then again and again they kissed, and Daniel Sweetland rode away.
At the top of the next dark hill he turned and looked back, but he saw nothing. Minnie had not lighted her lamp again. She stood and watched him vanish. Then she went to her bed in the dark and prayed brave prayers until the dawn broke.
CHAPTER VII
THE BAD SHIP “PEABODY”
Daniel Sweetland had decided on his course of action before he bade his wife farewell. Now he rode back to Furnum Regis, found the King’s Oven empty as he expected, and turned his horse’s head to the south. He crossed the main road, struck down a saddle path, and presently approached Vitifer Mine. Here the land was cut and broken into wild chaos of old-time excavations and deep natural gulleys and fissures. The place was dangerous, for terrific disused shafts opened here, and a network of rails and posts marked the more perilous tracts and kept the cattle out. Sweetland knew this region well, and now, dismounting, he led his horse to a wide pit known as Wall Shaft Gully, and tethered it firmly where miners, going to their work, must see it on the following morning. An ancient adit lined with granite yawned below, and local report said that it was unfathomable. Two years before a man had accidentally destroyed himself by falling into it, and though the fact was known, the nature of the place made it impossible to recover his corpse.
Now Daniel took a pencil and paper from his pocket. Then, under the waning moon, he wrote the words “Good-bye, all. Let Sim break it to my wife—D. Sweetland.” Next he took a stick, stuck it up, and set his message in a cleft of it; and lastly he kicked and broke the soil at the edge of the shaft, so that it should seem he had cast himself in with reluctance. That done, he set out for Plymouth at his best pace, consulted his watch, and saw that if all went well he might reach the shelter of the streets by four o’clock in the morning.
That information respecting his escape must be there before him, he knew. As soon as the police reached Princetown, telegrams would fly to Exeter and Plymouth and elsewhere. But Daniel trusted that early news would come from the Moor. Then, if once it was supposed that he had committed suicide, the severity of the search was certain to relax.
His estimate of the distance to be travelled proved incorrect, and the runaway found himself surprised by the first grey of morning long before he had reached the skirts of the town. He turned, therefore, into the deep woods that lie among those outlying fortresses which surround the great seaport, and near the neighbourhood of Marsh Mills, where the river Plym runs by long, shining reaches to the sea, Daniel hid close under an overhanging bank beside the water. Here he was safe enough, and saw no sign of life but the trout that rose beneath him. The food that Minnie made him carry was soon gone, and another nightfall found Sweetland ravenous. At dusk he lowered himself to the river and drank his fill, but not until midnight was past did he leave his snug holt and set forth again.