bargain.

He knew as well as a stag, that if he backed he might throw the
hounds out. So the first thing he did when he was over the wall
was to make the neatest double sharp to his right, and run along
under the wall for nearly half a mile.

Whereby Sir John, and the keeper, and the steward, and the
gardener, and the ploughman, and the dairymaid, and all the hue-
and-cry together, went on ahead half a mile in the very opposite
direction, and inside the wall, leaving him a mile off on the
outside; while Tom heard their shouts die away in the woods and
chuckled to himself merrily.

At last he came to a dip in the land, and went to the bottom of it,
and then he turned bravely away from the wall and up the moor; for
he knew that he had put a hill between him and his enemies, and
could go on without their seeing him.

But the Irishwoman, alone of them all, had seen which way Tom went.
She had kept ahead of every one the whole time; and yet she neither
walked nor ran. She went along quite smoothly and gracefully,
while her feet twinkled past each other so fast that you could not
see which was foremost; till every one asked the other who the
strange woman was; and all agreed, for want of anything better to
say, that she must be in league with Tom.

But when she came to the plantation, they lost sight of her; and
they could do no less. For she went quietly over the wall after
Tom, and followed him wherever he went. Sir John and the rest saw