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Updated: June 21, 2025
To get to Croston Heath, Molly had to go down a narrow lane overshadowed by trees, with picturesque old cottages dotted here and there on the steep sandy banks; and then there came a small wood, and then there was a brook to be crossed on a plank-bridge, and up the steeper fields on the opposite side were cut steps in the turfy path, which ended, she was on Croston Heath, a wide-stretching common skirted by labourers' dwellings, past which a near road to Hollingford lay.
At just that moment her feet reminded her that they had been wetted by the adventure in the punt, and she said to herself sagely that she must take precautions against a chill. And then she thought she detected some unusual phenomenon behind a clump of bushes to the right which hid a plank-bridge across a waterway. She would have been frightened if she had not been very excited.
On reaching it, Tom found its owner cutting up some firewood near his plank-bridge. "Hallo, Brixton!" he cried, looking up in some surprise as the young man advanced; "you seem to have bin in the wars. What have 'e been fightin' wi', lad?" "With a bear, Paul Bevan," replied Tom, sitting down on a log, with a long-drawn sigh. "You're used up, lad, an' want rest; mayhap you want grub also.
He stood there in the dusk, tall and mighty, a terrible figure, one hand pointing to the gate, the other still grasping the gray dog. The little man scuttled away in the half-light, and out of the yard. On the plank-bridge he turned and shook his fist at the darkening house. "Curse ye, James Moore!" he sobbed, "I'll be even wi' ye yet."
At the bend of the road the leaders appeared again, swinging wide on the curve, the wheelers flashed into view, and the light two-seated rig; then the whole affair straightened out and thundered down upon them across a narrow plank-bridge.
He returned to the entrance, and, taking up the plank-bridge, drew it into the passage, guiding its outer end on a slight branch, which seemed to have fallen across the chasm accidentally, but which in reality had been placed there for this purpose. Then, sliding it out again, he refixed it in position. "Is that too hard for you? Try."
Only one room high they were, and not placed opposite each other, but in and out as skittles are; only that the first of all, which proved to be the captain's, was a sort of double house, or rather two houses joined together by a plank-bridge, over the river. Fourteen cots my mother counted, all very much of a pattern, and nothing to choose between them, unless it were the captain's.
The shore-cables were of unusual size and weight, and apparently of unusual materials; the formation of a double line of two bridges, in fact, instead of one was almost without a parallel; and the completion of the work by laying on the ordinary plank-bridge a solid causeway composed of earth and brushwood, with a high bulwark on either side, was probably, if not unprecedented, at any rate very uncommon.
"No sick, doctor," called Bob Pottinger from underneath the trench-cover roof of his three-foot hole in the ground. "We're improving the position and have no time to be ill." The doctor and I crossed a sticky water-logged field, and passed over the plank-bridge that spanned the slow vagrant stream. A battery had their mess in one of the low creeper-clad cottages lining the road.
And last of all, leaping over the ground like a demoniac, making not for the two flags, but the plank-bridge, the white-haired figure of M'Adam. "He's beat! The Killer's beat!" roared a strident voice. "M'Adam wins! Five to four M'Adam! I lay agin Owd Bob!" rang out the clear reply. Red Wull was now racing parallel to the fugitives and above them.
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