At this there were more moans.
"No hare am I," said Dickon, stoutly, "but if they try me, more like a wolf. Pick me out these threads."
He knelt beside the lad, who with a bodkin from his doublet ripped one by one the hated lines that had shown Dickon to be evil Sir Watty's man.
Then Dickon stood upright, and filled himself with a great, deep breath. The new sense of liberty seemed to raise his stature and swell his girth. He took off his iron sallet, and shook his free head proudly, nearer to the sky than it had ever before been lifted.
"We will live in the greenwood," he said in bold, boyish confidence.
CHAPTER III.
A STRANGE CHRISTMAS EVE.
When two nights and two days had passed, Dickon and Andreas found themselves on the furthermost edge of the forest. Here skirted the woodland a highroad which neither had seen before. Beyond this were a rolling moor country and distant mountains, the sight of which was strange to them; but house of any kind there was none.
When their eager gaze, sweeping all the prospect, had made certain that no habitation was to be seen, Dickon groaned deeply, and little Andreas wept outright.
As they stood thus, Andreas clenched his hands at his breast, lifting his white face upward toward the bare boughs. Then he closed his eyes, and staggering a single step, fell forward to the ground, and lay there on his face like a log.
Dickon lifted his comrade in his arms, and bore him back into the thicket. Out in the open where the two youths had viewed the highroad the earth was frozen stiff, and snow lay thin-spread upon it; but behind them, on the path they had made, lay warmer nooks sheltered by tangled shrubs.