Dickon stood in trembling amaze for a little, staring down upon these twain, whom he had in a frenzied second put beyond further combat. He shook like any winter leaf as he looked, and his legs bent beneath him—for this foremost dead man was Morgan, the very bone and sinew of Egswith's dread band.
To be burned alive were the lightest vengeance for such a trick as this.
Dickon now thought of flight. Turning in haste, he saw before him the boy with the casket, standing at the entrance to a rocky glade just beyond, and looking out upon him with a white face. He moved swiftly to him, and laid hold upon the box.
"Speed for your life!" he hissed; and then the pair, with no further word, set forth in a breathless stumbling race through the forest.
Before long the echoes of savage shouts at the rear rang over the thicket, but the hunted lads only shivered in silence and pressed on. Then the cries died away, and there was no sound in all the woodland save the rustle of their hurried footsteps.
At last, when they had crossed a second valley, and had arrived at a hill upon which tall fir trees grew sparsely, and the ground was spread with a dense carpet of dry spines, the strange boy threw himself to the earth.
"Further I may not stir," he groaned, and put his head down upon the soft pine-needles in utter weakness.
Dickon lifted the lad in his arms, and bore him a little way to a nook where some stunted firs, bunched close in a ring around an ancestral stump, offered shelter. There, when he had disposed his companion in comfort, and stripped off his own fretting haubergeon, Dickon had time to think and to look about him.
The lad whose life he had saved in so terrible a fashion was slender and small of stature, yet had a face which to Dickon seemed full of the wisdom of years. It was a pale and girlish face, with thin, fine lineaments and blue eyes from which shone knowledge and swift sense.
The brow was strangely high and white. Dickon had seen such once or twice among the younger of the preaching road-friars. The long hair which fell in two partings from it was of the color and softness of flax. His thin legs were cased in some light hose which Dickon held to be of silk—puny enough stuff for such a rude journey as they were making, and now much torn and stained.