“My blacks—for Sally,” she whispered back.
“Ah! You showed like a shadow-shape on the bents. The moon will be up soon; it must be the heather again, lass. Bear up; the next Ridge is the beginning of Soyland. Put your arm in mine, and stoop.”
They skirted the patch of bents stooping. As they began the next descent they heard voices behind them and a soft laugh; there were two sentries. They took to the heather again.
At three o’clock the moon rose, a great half-round over the dark hillside. Cut out against her disc, a quarter of a mile away, a third sentry showed; but the light revealed a little more clearly the divisions of the tortuous heather bushes, and they went with less noise and more quickly. There did not seem to be sentries in the bottoms, and they were unchallenged as they crossed the lower slopes of Soyland. They began the ascent of Soyland.
By half-past four o’clock they were five hundred feet up the rocky hill, a thousand above the sea, among enormous grey boulders that studded the heather. Cliffs rose towering above them like an eaves. Bidding Cicely remain at the foot of a narrow rocky gorge, Monjoy started away under these eaves. Presently he returned. Two score yards farther on he pulled aside a great mass of heather; behind the heather was a crack scarce a foot high.
“Let me go in first; take Jimmy,” he said; and he forced himself through the crack, and presently received Cicely in his arms. The cavern was black as pitch, but it had a floor of dry sand. Cicely, exhausted, stretched herself upon it with Jimmy at her bosom, and Monjoy lifted her head and pillowed it on his breast.
It was ten o’clock and a brilliant morning when they awoke. Monjoy stepped at once up the sandy slope and put aside the screen of heather from the opening. Across the valley, against the sky, four red dots moved; and the like, he knew, would be moving on the hill over their heads. But he was on his own ground in Soyland. There was not a nook nor corner of it that he had not rummaged for ore, and of the very cavern in which they were he had one day thought jestingly how carefully Matthew Moon would have taken its bearings against an unforeseen hour when he might have need of it. He could venture out, too, as, indeed, he must, no less for information than for milk for the infant and sustenance for themselves. The cave was of rock; it glowed with a soft and pleasant morning light; but it was not more than a dozen yards deep, and led nowhere.
Cicely had spread bread in her lap and opened the jar of milk, and they breakfasted cheek against cheek, Cicely rising once to still Jimmy’s crowing as he rolled and tumbled on the sandy floor. After breakfast Arthur kissed Cicely, a smacking, business-like buss on the mouth, spied for a while through the opening, and went out.
It was two o’clock when he returned, and gave Cicely such news as he had. The furnaces were only a couple of miles away; there was a camp there, and Soyland was picketed. But the soldiers could not keep the Holdsworth and Brotherton men from their own hills, and from behind a rock he had seen one or two by whom he did not especially want to be seen. On the Ridge to the westward of them, too, red spots were marching and counter-marching; but they were busiest behind them and to the north-east, Wadsworth way. “I’ll go out later in the afternoon,” he said. “I may run across a man I may speak to, for all the £200. Did you know your husband was worth £200, love?...”
At four o’clock he went out again. It was past seven when he returned, and something in his cheerfulness seemed to alarm Cicely.