In half an hour Louis Raincy could see Patsy's face suffused with eager joy, freedom and the red in the east together making it flush like a dusky peach.
"Oh, I am so glad," she broke out when at last they could ride together over a little stretch of bent, "I had not even my Canary Island knife, or anything, but somehow I thought that you or Stair would follow me."
"It was all Stair's doing," said Louis; "he called me, and gave me the chance to help him when he could quite as well have taken one of his brothers, Fergus or Agnew."
"Why did he stay behind just now?" Patsy asked. "If they capture him they will kill him."
"I think there is no great fear of that, for the present, at least," said Louis Raincy, loyally. "Stair Garland has many hiding-places. I don't believe any one can catch him in his own land. He is off to find a moor-pony and will ride after us as soon as it is safe. If not, he will come home on foot, lying up in the daytime. He knows every farm and cothouse and is welcome at all. Sea-cave and moss-hag, wood-shelter and whin-bush, he knows every hidie-hole for forty mile."
Louis and Patsy kept so far to the north among the flowes of the moors that they never once came in sight of the road, along which all that day frenzied messengers tore east and west with tidings that the King's son had been murdered near the White Loch, by a gang of ruffians who had laid a trap and overturned his carriage.
So the two young people travelled in a great loneliness of plovers and curlews and peewits, all singing and calling and whistling their hardest. They saw the glimmer of a herd's house or two, faint whitewashed dots on the brown, surface of the moor. But of living souls they met not one.
Nor had they seen anything of Stair when, at dusk, they breasted the last bosky eyebrow of Raincy territory which overhung the rich Ferris valleys, and saw beneath them, as it had been deserted, the House of Cairn Ferris. Windows had been knocked out. Household gear lay scattered in the yard and even littered the avenue. A great blackened oblong showed the position of a burned hay-mow.
Louis halted a moment, in doubt what he should do, and then seeing that there was no safety in such a place for Patsy, he turned the tired horses about and rode straight for the great towers of Castle Raincy which frowned above them out of the purple gloom of the woods.