Returning to the cover of the trees, he stepped slowly round to the back. There he stopped. The little back gate of the temple was open. He must have guessed correctly: the monks had fled. The boy would have thrown caution to the winds and rushed to the door if some whispering sense of discretion had not restrained his movements, causing him to turn in bare time to see a gray cloak withdrawn behind a neighboring tree. Edward stopped still in alarm, then he gave a shriek of fright and took swiftly to his heels as the monk abandoned his futile ambush and came thundering in pursuit. The other monk emerged from the door within which he had been hiding and joined in the chase.
Edward ran as he had never run before, throwing away his bow in his haste and tearing madly past the front gate of the monastery. The men behind him were fast. He dared not turn his head to see if they were gaining, but he knew this time they were staking all on his capture. They must catch him and close this one mouth which could babble their secret. They were desperate men; if Edward's powers of endurance were trebled by fear, their own fleetness of foot was enhanced not only by the sense that Nancy was the prize of their victory, but also that the loss of the monastery where they had lived might be the price of defeat.
But the race was never run to its finish. Before he was aware of approaching them, Edward, scampering madly, head-down, had crashed between the burly figures of two men. Cold with dismay, certain that he had been intercepted, he was trying to shake himself free from the hand which detained him when he heard a voice exclaim in English:—
"Slowly, slowly, my lad! What's all this about?"
For the first time he looked up to see with amazement that he was not in the hands of ill-met friends of the two monks, but held by the very two foreigners who once had applauded his cricket; he was a captive of the Western barbarians whom, in his mock wars, he had been defying—and very happy to be their captive after the real warfare of this unlucky afternoon.
"My sister!" he cried. "They have got her up there."
He pointed to the monks, who had stopped, evidently chagrined by this new turn of affairs.
"Where?" said one of the men, who had a vivid memory of Nancy's beauty.
"In the temple," said Edward breathlessly; "they want to make her their slave."
The men chuckled, despite themselves, at Edward's earnestness.