Incident at the Cross in Hand (AW)

THE CROSS IN HAND.

WAITING FOR THE PASSING OF THE CAR.

A small knot of people have gathered at the Cross in Hand waiting for the motor-’bus from Ross to take them to the county town.

The evening wind blows chilly from the Black Mountains so plainly to be seen, although nearly twenty miles away. Lines and blotches of snow outline its cwms and hollows, its straight ancient trackways climbing the ridge, whose long strangely even sky-line terminates abruptly at Hay Bluff, where it drops a thousand feet in steep escarpment to plateau and valley, to the hillside churchyard at Cusop and the border town of Hay.

The triangular grass patch where the little group stand has now no other mark than a heap of stones for road-mending and a clumsy iron direction post. But its old place name is eloquent of past doings. Three other spots called Cross in Hand there are in the county, and all at the junction of highways. In pre-historic days the straight sighted trackways made to bring salt from the “wick,” or flint flakes from Wiltshire knappers, or for other long distant early wants, had crossed at these points, and at many another cross road with ancient place name.

Then in medieval times, when criminals had taken refuge in churches possessing right of sanctuary, had foresworn the kingdom before the King’s Coroner, had been given so many days to get to the nearest port, had been granted protection so long as clad in white smock and carrying a small wooden cross painted white, they—“cross-in-hand”—kept strictly to the King’s highway; this spot and the many other ones with a similiar name must have been shelters to them for nights on the road.

But it is of none of these things that the present group of people think. Their thoughts go to the drama which culminates in the Shire Hall. The farmer, who has brought in his ewes and lambs from the paddock to the corner homestead, lingers to tell what he knows. He has just had news from a passing trap that the jury had retired. For ten days now he has seen the prisoner go by morning and evening in a motorcar between the gaol at the port of Gloucester and the King’s Assize at Hereford. It is getting time now for it, unless the jury disagree. If it passes with no prisoner, he is acquitted. But if —

Many motors pass. Then the one. In it the crouching figure cf Armstrong with two warders. Fragments of those terrible words which all now know to have been uttered within the hour just gone cannot be shaken from the mind. “That you be taken hence to the place from which you came —”

There is no longer a refuge on the way at the Cross in Hand.
X.Y.Z.