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"From the North?" asked the coachman; "I'll give him a seat in the coach to-night and take him home." Ralph stepped back and looked over some of the people. A man was lying on the ground, his head in a woman's lap. It was Simeon Stagg. When Robbie Anderson left Wythburn, his principal and immediate purpose was to overtake Simeon Stagg.
Ray did not succumb to the paralytic seizure occasioned by the twofold shock which she had experienced. On the morning after Ralph's departure from Wythburn she seemed to awake from the torpor in which she had lain throughout the two preceding days. She opened her eyes and looked up into the faces that were bent above her.
It was as if nature had down to the last moment meant Willy for a girl. He had been an apt scholar at school, and was one of the few persons in Wythburn having claims to education. Willy's elder brother, Ralph, more nearly resembled his father. He had his father's stature and strength of limb, but some of his mother's qualities had also been inherited by him.
The city of Wythburn stood in a narrow valley at the foot of Lauvellen, and at the head of Bracken Water. It was a little but populous village, inhabited chiefly by sheep farmers, whose flocks grazed on the neighboring hills. It contained rather less than a hundred houses, all deep thatched and thick walled.
It was obvious that Ralph and Sim had not taken the direct road home to Wythburn, for if they had done so he must have met them as he came from Staveley. There was the bare possibility that he had missed them by going round the fields to the old woman's cottage; but this seemed unlikely.
Jim, the driver, came into the kitchen at that moment on his way to bed, and unravelled the mystery of the map by showing that it was possible for Robbie's friends to go off the Carlisle road towards Gaskarth and Wythburn at the village of Askham.
When she rejoined her companion her mind was made up to a daring enterprise. "The men of Wythburn, such of them as we can trust," she said, "are in the funeral train. We must go ourselves; at least I must go." "Do let me go, too," said Liza; "but where are you going?" "To cross the fell to Stye Head." "We can't go there, Rotha two girls." "What of that? But you need not go.
"Pray tell my lords and the jury what you know concerning them." The woman tried to speak and stopped, tried again and stopped. Counsel, coming to her relief, said, "It was in Wythburn you saw them; when was that?" "I passed through it with my two children at Martinmas," the witness began falteringly. "Tell my lords and the jury what happened then."
Reverting to the subject of Ralph Ray's flight from Wythburn, he said that it was well that the young man had withdrawn himself, for had he remained longer in these parts, and had the high sheriff at Carlisle not proceeded against him, he himself, though much against his inclination, might have felt it his duty as a servant of God and the King to put the oath of allegiance to him.
This was no other than little blink-eyed Reuben Thwaite. He was sitting muffled up in his farm wagon and singing merry snatches to keep the cold out of his lungs. Reuben had been at Carlisle over night with sundry hanks of thread, which he had sold to the linen weavers. He had found a good market by coming so far, and he was returning to Wythburn in high feckle. "What poor lad's this? Why, what!
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