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While they waited by their horses I drew near to one of them and asked him if he knew aught of my brother, Captain Mark Lantine. He answered, after eyeing me sharply, that he knew my brother well a very gallant officer, now serving with the Earl of Cleveland's brigade. "That will be on the slope beneath Boconnoc," said I.
If we could reach and right it without being discovered, either one of us was clever enough, with an oar over the stern, to scull noiselessly across to the entrance of a creek where the current would take us up towards Boconnoc between banks held on either side by Royalists; to whom, if they surprised us, we could tell our business.
But the Mohuns had removed to Boconnoc by the time that they achieved their greatest notoriety, in the person of Lord Charles, some of whose duels partook rather of the nature of assassination than of fair fight, the most notable being his slaying of the actor Mountford.
So on this afternoon, when Hopton and the Cornish troops were engaging and defeating Ruthen on Braddock Down, Margery and I counted the rattles of musketry borne down to us on the still reaches of the river and, climbing to the earthwork past the field where old Will Retallack stuck to his ploughing with an army of gulls following and wheeling about him as usual, spied the smoke rolling over the edge of Boconnoc woodland to the north-east; but never a soldier we saw that day or for months after.
I learn'd too, that Joan had come in for some rough talk to which she put a stop, as she told me, by offering to fight any man Jack of them for the buttons on his buffcoat. "Where is this Braddock?" "Nigh to Lord Mohun's house at Boconnoc: seven mile away to the south, and seven mile or so from Bodmin, as a crow flies."
But while I stared, and the wreaths of fog hid and again disclosed them, I heard Margery's whisper "They are escaping to-night. It can only be by the bridge and across Boconnoc downs. If we can win to Mark and warn him!" She drew me off into the wood at a sharp angle, and we began to climb beneath the branches. They dripped on us, soaking us to the skin; but this we scarcely felt.
Alongside of this we kept, and a little below it, crossing the high-road which leads east from Lostwithiel bridge, and, beyond that, advancing more boldly under the lee of a hedge beside a by-road which curves towards the brow of Boconnoc downs. I began to find it strange that, for all our secrecy, no one challenged us here.
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