He lay flat on his back and started himself down the slippery way. His speed increased, and he clutched at heather roots to check himself, using his heel also as a brake. That was dangerous, for it lifted his whole body. The heather rocked and swept past him in a blur; he plunged dizzily downwards, jolted and breathless; and sixty yards down he clutched desperately at another bush and lifted twice clear over, his body taking a heather bush at each bound. He lay in a deep gutter between two purple clumps, scratched and bruised and panting, his body arched over the child; then he was up again. His first glance was at the rocky eaves; their line was sharp against the sky and unoccupied; and between himself and the men with the hounds he had now set a low roll of moorland.
It was now he who must take a risk—the risk of a sentry appearing suddenly on the eaves. He ran twenty yards ahead, glanced up again at the grey rocks, ran forward again, and continued to run, his head constantly over his shoulder. Jimmy’s face puckered, and again Monjoy hushed him.
“Ssh! Jimmy boy; we’ll manage yet, you and I; the farther south the less chance they have of rounding us—but not too far, Jimmy, or we shan’t catch those damned dogs. What fools they are to keep ’em leashed, Jimmy! They’re lazy rascals.... Now just a little farther——”
The child became quiet again, and by and by a further fall of the land gave them a moment’s breathing-space.
He was now far down in the valley, with nothing but the rolling heather about him. “Do you think this’ll do?” he said to the child; and again he moistened his finger to the wind. He drew out a pistol. He found a flat stone, knocked the priming from the pan, and began to work up a little tinder and tow with more powder from his flask. He set the stone down under the heather and drew the trigger over it.
He had to draw thrice before the spark of flint and standard ignited the charge on the stone; then it caught, and he drew the heather close over it. A bright little flame licked and crackled; it spread; and a thin smoke and the pungent smell of burning heather arose. Monjoy tore up a smaller bush and held it for a moment in the blaze.
“Now we begin, Jimmy,” he said. “This is very bad for the birds, and you’re not to do it when you get older, remember; but once in a while——”
A few yards on he fired another bush. After the weeks of drought a spark sufficed; and he advanced at a quick walk trailing his brand. When it burnt out he took another. Already from the first point of firing, the flames, of an orange scarce visible, were advancing up the hillside before the light breeze. “Variable; but there’ll be more wind higher up,” he assured Jimmy; “whew, but it’s dry! Too dry; we want some damp to make a smoke—a nice dense smoke to hide us. What, Jim?—There, I think that’ll do.”
He flung his brand from him and turned north again and a little west.
Cicely had mounted the rocky cleft in pitiful trepidation. “Brave and clever,” she told herself she must be; she repeated the words over and over, but they did not stop the painful thumping of her heart. This increased as she neared the head of the ravine, and she felt that a crisis of nerves was seizing her. It came, and she sank in a huddle under a rock, stifling hysterical sobs in a fold of her skirt. She could see the open space at the top of the ravine; she dared not approach it. For nearly twenty minutes she lay, her sobs gradually subsiding, but her will gone from her; and then there chanced something that brought her round like vinegar. A stone’s-toss away she saw appear the red back of a soldier.