Page:The Dark Frigate (Hawes).djvu/65

When they had left the village behind them they stopped to breathe and rest.

Leaning against a tree, Martin mopped the sweat from his brow. “Had I but a sword,” he cried, “I’d ha’ given them theme for thought, the scurvy knaves!"

“It seems thy brother, of whom we were to have got so much, bears thee little love.” And Phil smiled.

For this Martin returned him an oath, and sat upon a stone.

On the left lay the village whence they had come, and, though the sun was not yet up, the spire of the church and the thatched roofs of the cottages were very clearly to be seen in the pure morning air. Smoke was rising from chimneys and small sounds of awakening life came out to the vagabonds on the lonely road, as from the woods at their back came the shrill, loud laugh of the yaffle, and from the marsh before them, the croaking of many frogs.

Martin’s shifty eyes ranged from the cows standing about the straw rack in a distant barton in the east to a great wooded park on a hill in the west. "I will not go hungry,” he cried with an oath, “because it is his humour to deny me. We shall see what we shall see.”

He rose and turned west and with Phil at his heels he came presently to the great park they had seen from a distance.

"We shall see what we shall see.”

With that he left the road and following a copse beside a meadow entered the wood, where the two buried themselves deep in the shade of the great trees. The sun was up now and the birds were fluttering and clamouring high overhead, but to the motion and clamour of small birds they gave no heed. From his pocket