“Tricked him this time,” said Samson, chuckling, and once more starting, for a bullet whistled by his ear, and directly after there was the report.
But he ran on feeling that he had passed two of the chains of sentries, and that now all he had to do was to clear the mounted patrols.
This he set himself to do with the more confidence that there was no horseman in sight; and, with his hopes rising, he kept on now at a steady trot, which he changed for a walk as he reached the irregular surface of the moor, scored into hundreds of little valleys running into one another, and the larger toward the sea.
“Nothing like a bow, after all,” muttered Samson, as he ran. “Shoot four or five arrows while you’re loading one of those clumsy great guns. Got away from you this time, my lad. Ay, you may shout,” he muttered as he heard a hail. “Likely! You’d have to holloa louder to bring me back, and— Well, now, look at that!” he grumbled, as he got about five hundred yards away, and suddenly found that he was the quarry of two of the mounted men, who had caught sight of him, and were coming from opposite directions, bent on cutting him off. “Well, I think I know this bit o’ the country better than you do, and if I aren’t mounted on a horse, I’m mounted on as good a pair o’ legs as most men, and deal better than my brother Nat’s.”
He said all this in an angry tone, as he made straight for a patch of woodland at the edge of the moor, when, seeing this, and that the man on foot was steadily running in Samson’s track, the two horsemen immediately bore away so as to intercept the fugitive on the further side, and soon disappeared from view.
“I thought you’d do that,” said Samson to himself; and he turned sharply round, ran a few yards towards his pursuer, and then turned along one of the courses of a stream, and in a minute was out of sight, but only to double again in quite a different direction along the dry course of another rivulet, which wound here and there to the south.
“Get round ’em somehow,” said Samson; and, settling himself into a slow trot, he ran on and on for quite a quarter of an hour, to where the hollow in which he had been running opened out on to open moor all covered with whortleberry and bracken, offering good hiding should an enemy be in sight, and with the further advantage of being only about a mile from the Manor.
“I shall trick ’em now,” he said. “Once I’ve told ’em at the old house, they may catch me if they like; but they won’t care to when they see me going back to camp.”
“Halt!”
A sword flashed in poor Samson’s eyes, and he found that the opening of the dry course was guarded by another mounted man, who spurred up to him and caught him by the collar before he had dashed away a dozen yards.