But the voice was always in his ears, in spite of the wind. Always pushing him on when his lungs begged him to stop for breath, always at his heels like a living thing intent on savaging him.

“You will hang for this, see if you don't. That's my revenge, and you'll think about that when the rope goes round your neck and the black hood comes down-”

As a goad, the voice was crueler than any whip.

He was terrified of it.

S ome time later he fell, the air whipped out of his body and his chin buried in the snow. For an instant he lay there, listening. Was it his heart beating so hard that it choked him-or was it the crunch of footsteps coming down the swale after him? Frantic, he clawed his way to his feet again. He turned to stare into the darkness behind him. But the sky and the land seemed inseparable, a blank gray-white swirl that offered neither hope nor sanctuary.

There was no one behind him. There couldn't be. And yet he could almost feel the warmth of a body coming towards him. He could see shapes dissolving and solidifying in the wild eddy of flakes caught by the bitter wind. Like a ghost.

A ghost…

He began to cry again as he ran on, wishing it was over, wishing that he was dead, like the others.

But he couldn't be dead like the others. He would be hanged when they found him, and the last thing he would ever feel was the jerk of the thick rope around his neck…

CHAPTER THREE

From the village itself, Sergeant Miller had gathered some two dozen able-bodied men with a motley number of horses. The plan was to send these men posthaste to the nearest farms, where they would recruit others to go on to their outlying neighbors. A human chain, adding links at every stage, reaching across Urskdale.