"Nay, it sufficeth," answered Mr. Crymes. "None will know what is fastened within. If we were—and the chance is not like to come—overpowered by highwaymen, I trow they would demand the key and open the boot though the lock were twice as strong. My own luggage shall travel in the front boot. Go, lad, fetch me more of the gold. Even in the best cause men will fight faintly unless they be paid."
Fox obeyed, and brought all the bags in pairs to the carriage, and saw the old man stow them away. He was in an ill-humour, and cursed his father's folly in his heart.
"How if the venture fails?" he asked, "and then you be led to Tyburn. It will be a sorry end to have lost all this gold as well as thy life. Thy life is thine own to throw away, but the gold I may claim a right to. I am thy son, I want it; I am about to be married, and have a use for the money; now it will all go into the pockets of wretched country clowns, who will shoulder a musket and trail a pike for a shilling—if it were given to me, I could put it to good usage."
"Come with me to my study," said the old man. "Here come Jock and Jonas from the kitchen. Come along with me, and thou shall have twenty pound in silver and gold, and a hundred more in bills that may be discounted when the present troubles are over."
"I will ride with thee, father, some part of the road as thy guard—till the daybreak."
CHAPTER XLV. UNLADING.
The hour was past midnight and before dawn when the great coach of Squire Crymes approached the long hill of Black Down. The road from Plymouth to Exeter was one of singular loneliness for a considerable part of its course, but in no part did it traverse country so desolate and apart from population as in the stretch, a posting stage between Tavistock and Okehampton, a distance of sixteen miles. It ran high up on the flanks of Dartmoor, mounting it nearly nine hundred feet above the level of the sea, with the trackless waste of the forest on one hand, and on the other a descent by ragged and rugged lanes to distant villages. Lydford, almost the sole one at all near the road, was severed from it by ravines sawn through the rock, through which the moor rivers thundered and boiled, ever engaged in tearing for themselves a deeper course.
Precisely because this track of road was the most inhospitable and removed from human haunts, was it one of the safest to travel even in the most troublous times, for no one dreamed of traversing it after nightfall, when aware that for sixteen miles he would be cut off from help in the event of a breakage of his carriage or the laming of a horse; and as no one ever thought of taking this road except in broad day, when it was fairly occupied by trains of travellers, no footpads and highwaymen thought it worth their while to try their fortunes upon it.