Chapter VII.
IN THE TOILS.
That afternoon the house of Captain Dawe was filled with visitors more or less illustrious. The dignitaries of the forest and the river were assembled in solemn conclave. The scare caused by the first rumours of the Spanish plot was revived in tenfold magnitude. Morgan's wounded arm was a mute witness to the daring and activity of the foe. The knight and the forester could describe every lineament of the would-be assassin. The yellow, parchment face, the spare, sinewy body clad in black doublet and hosen, had been seen for a moment by many a forester. And the woodland men, brimful of superstition, had already invested him with supernatural powers.
A belated swineherd had gone in terror to his master with a story that he had come upon the "men in black" dancing beneath an oak, enveloped in blue flames, and that the smell of the "brimstone" had laid him on the ground in a stupor from sunset to moonrise, more than an hour after! The following day, in the early forenoon, he had led a trembling party to the spot, and, sure enough, there was a blackened circle in the bracken and the charred bark and singed leaves of the tree to testify to the truth of his tale. Neither swineherd nor shepherd nor forester had dared to pass the tree from that hour. The woodsman's story was not all exaggeration. He had actually stumbled upon the two villains, Basil and John, trying the kindling properties of the bracken, and he had promptly fallen in a swoon from sheer terror. By the common folk his account was believed ad literam, and not all the better sort saw the true inwardness of the occurrence. So the assembly had serious matter for thought and discussion.
The leaders saw the gravity of the situation, and their apprehensions grew when they found that those who best knew the forest were becoming rapidly infected with superstitious fears. As a race the Dean men were brave and tenacious—centuries of border warfare had made them so—but their very life amidst the gloom of the trees and the roaring of the streams, their brains teeming with mythic tales of the dark, deep pools and echoing caves, made them ready believers in the "uncanny." The forest could only be guarded by those who knew its devious ways; the number of such warders was limited. Now it would be impossible to get any man to keep a lonely watch; sentinels must be posted in groups for mutual comfort and assistance, seeing that the tangible danger of Basil's dagger was to be feared as much as the intangible perils that sprang from the imagination. To group the watchers was to narrow the guarded area, and it was plain to the council that, at night especially, little of the rolling tract of hill and valley could be patrolled; the foe would have fairly free range.
One precaution could be taken, and that was promptly done. Orders were issued that no bracken was to be cut except with the direct sanction of the admiral. When cut it was to be carried green, and dried away from the trees. Large rewards were also offered to any man who could bring any "man in black," alive or dead, to the admiral. Visions of high preferment were opened out to those of gentle blood. Suspected persons in the forest area were to be closely watched, and most houses professing the Romish faith were under suspicion.
Johnnie Morgan spent but little time in the society of the volatile Dorothy. His heart was full of love, but his head was overloaded with affairs of state, and the pain in his arm filled the air with "phantoms" in black that blotted out the sweeter picture of a teasing "fairy" in white. The admiral, never so happy as when on the water, went back to Gatcombe on the tide. Sir Walter tramped through the woods with Morgan, and, now that the council was over, he came back to the lighter topics of poetry and love-making.
"Well, Master Morgan," he cried merrily, "and how didst thou fare in the pretty arbour in the garden?"
Johnnie's face dropped to a gloomy length. "But indifferently, sir knight. The maid will not be wooed. She is as fickle as April."