By this time the panic-stricken soldiers of the garrison had recovered from their alarm, and started with shouts after the fugitive, being now again as eager to take him, and much more ready to sacrifice him when taken, than they had even been before. On they hurried after him, yelling like a pack of hounds, and cheered to the chase by the revengeful and bloodthirsty Franciscan, their pursuit being directed by the flaming torches at his head; and forward he strode down the hollow way to the mead of Norham, and, dreading capture worse than death itself, be darted across the flat ground, flaming like a meteor, and, dashing at once into the foaming stream of the Tweed, began wading across through a depth of water enough to have drowned any ordinary man; until at length, partly by swashing and partly by swimming, during which last operation the lights he bore on his head were extinguished, he made his way fairly into Scotland.
His pursuers halted in amazement. The whole time occupied in his escape seemed to have been but as a few minutes. Fear once more fell upon them, and they talked to one another in broken sentences and half-smothered voices.
“Surely,” said one, “the Devil, whose servant he was, must have aided him.”
“Ay, ay, that’s clear enow,” said another.
“He was stone-dead, and came miraculously alive again,” said a third.
“Nay,” said a fourth, “he came not alive again; ’twas but the Devil that took possession of his dead body.”
“In good troth thou hast hit it, Gregory,” said a fifth, with an expression of horror; “for no one but the Devil himself could have broken the cords that tied his hands, or kicked down the drawbridge after such a fashion.”
“Didst see how he walked on the water?” cried a sixth.
“Ay,” said a seventh, “and how he vanished in the middle o’ Tweed in a flash o’ fire that made the very water brenn again?” [[134]]
Having thus wrought themselves into a belief that the spectre they had been following was no other than the Devil flying off with the already exanimate body of Ancient Fenwick, they trembled at the very idea of having pursued him; and they crept silently back to the garrison, the blood in their veins freezing with terror, and crossing themselves from time to time as they went.