To the first of these Dickon pushed his way, and putting the lad softly down, began gathering dry, dead leaves by armfuls and piling them over the senseless body. On these he laid branches, and then again more leaves, until only the boyish, sleeping face met the air.
Now he made another journey to the outer place which they had won, and gleaning from the ground the three things he had left there, brought them back to where the lad lay under his leaves, and put them down beside him. These were the crossbow, the book in its casket, and the mangled carcass of a boar which he had killed, but had eaten of more to his harm than good, since there was no fire with which to cook the meat.
Dickon looked down to his friend, and saw that the boy was awake, and sick unto death. Cold and hunger and the toil of wild wandering had dealt harshly with even Dickon's own tough English flesh and blood. They were killing the fragile lad from foreign parts.
"Do you get warmth?" he asked dolefully, as he had asked scores of other times.
For answer the lad closed his eyes and shook his head in weakness.
Then Dickon knelt down and did a thing strange to all his knowledge of customs. He kissed the pale forehead which lay half-hid among the leaves. Then, as if in shame, he sprang to his feet.
"Bide you here till I come," he said, and turning, strode off toward the open, with the crossbow under his arm.
For warmth's sake and the peril which brooded behind him, he swung himself forward at a swift pace down the highroad. The air and the movement kindled his blood a little.
A full league it seemed to him he must have tramped, over barren moorland and through winding defiles with steep, unfriendly sides of bare rock, before he came to anything that spoke of human habitation. Then, as the skies were darkening into twilight, he entered unawares into the deeper shadows of a great wall, gray and forbidding, rising above the highway like a part of the boulders themselves.
At the base of this, as if entering upon the heart of the earth, was a small, black door of wood, framed in frowning stone.