The Yeoman Adventurer
hall, and were collecting their scattered wits after their first rout. To
my regret, the raucous cursings of the sergeant showed that he had not
been killed and apparently not even hit.
"God damn ye!" he yelled. "Ten of you driven back like sheep by a raw
youth. I'll settle with ye for it. Think I picked ye out of the stews and
stink-holes of London to stand this? There isn't one of ye with the guts
of a louse. I'll take the skin off the ribs of you for this, damn ye, and
most of your pimp's flesh along with it!"
"What sort of guts was it brought yow tumblin' down so quick?" put in the
surly voice of the landlord. "Yow cudna 'a come any faster if yer blasted
yed 'ad been blown to bits instead of my lantern."
Some of the men laughed at this, whereon the sergeant blasphemed enough
to make a devil from hell shiver. He cowed the dragoons, but the innkeeper
only growled, "A three-bob lantern blown to bits! Fork out three bob!"
"I'll have him if I have to blow the house to bits!" vociferated the
sergeant.
"Fork out three bob!" repeated the host.
Not a word had passed between us on the stair-head, and now, at the sound
of preparations for a fresh assault, the Colonel took each of us by the
arm and led us into his room.
"The stair-head cannot be held against fire from the opposite landing,"
he whispered.
When inside, he locked the door, and I helped him pile the bed on end
behind it, heaping all the other furniture against the bed-frame to hold
the mattress and bedding up against the door. Margaret, at a brief word of
command, had meanwhile kept watch through the window.
"That's a fair defence," he said contentedly. "What are these devils?"
"Brocton's dragoons," said I. "I've settled two of them, one on the roof
and one in the passage."
"Good lad! Ten of 'em would be long odds in the open; here we ought to
have the laugh of them. Load your pistols! Damme, it's a bit chilly.
Fortunately there's some warm work ahead."
He stamped up and down the room, swishing his arms round his body, and
stopping every now and again to make some trifling change in our hurriedly
contrived barricade. Margaret stood by quietly at the window, and when I
had reloaded my pistols, I joined her there.
The ladder had been shifted and now lay along in the snow. There, too,
lay the body of the dragoon I had shot, crumpled up in his death-agony. A
brood of owls were clucking and cluttering about under the hovel, and
there, too, leaning against the rear wheel of the wain, were a lumpish
wagoner and our surly host. The one was stolidly smoking, the other was
holding the battered lantern out at arm's length, and I could, as it were,
see him growling to the lout at his side, "'Ew's to fork out for this'n?"
A girl went towards them from the house, circling, with averted head, far
round the dead dragoon, bearing them from the kitchen a smoking jug of ale.
"In England," said Margaret, "snow adds the charm of peace and purity to
the countryside. There's never, I should think, enough of it to give the
sense of utter desolation and deadness that it gives one in Russia."
"It's so uncertain with us," was my reply. "I've known a whole winter
without a snowflake, and I've walked knee-deep in it in May."
The Colonel stopped his marching and swishing and came to the window.
"Don't bother, Madge," said he. "We'll pull through. Hallo, I didn't see
yon wagon last night."
He took out his snuff-box and, hearing the noise of the enemy in the
corridor, walked with it in his hand across to the door. He tapped his box
with accustomed preciseness, but I, a step behind, having lingered for a
last look into Margaret's eyes, heard him mutter, "Damn the wagon!"
"Ho, there within, in the King's name," shouted the sergeant.
"Ho, there without, in the devil's name," mimicked the Colonel.
"I want speech with Colonel Waynflete," shouted the sergeant.
"Then, seeing that Colonel Waynflete cannot at the moment give himself
the pleasure of slitting your ruffian's throat, you may speak on," was the
reply.
"You and your daughter may proceed on your way unharmed if you surrender.
It's only Wheatman the farmer, now with you, that I want."
He could be heard all over the room to the last syllable, and Margaret
quickly left her place at the window and came towards us, but the Colonel
in a stern whisper ordered her back. "How dare you leave your post! Watch
that wagon!" She crimsoned and returned.
"If Master Freake were here, Oliver, I think he would remark that there
was no market for colonels to-day," said her father to me with a wry
smile. He gave the lid of his snuff-box a final tap, opened it, and held
it out to me. In the sense of the term known to fashionable London, he was
not a good-looking man, but as he stood there, waiting gravely while I
took my pinch, he had the irresistible charm of the highest manliness.
"Do you agree, Colonel?" bawled the sergeant.
"I do not," he shouted, and took his snuff with great relish.
"By God," and now the sergeant roared like a wounded bull, "I'll have you
all in ten minutes." Then, as an afterthought, he added, "Here, I say, you
Wheatman, do you agree?"
"Certainly," said I, "I'll come at once." And I should have gone, there
and then, but for the Colonel, who, as I laid a hand on the nearest piece
of our barricade, promptly said, "I've only one way with deserters," and
levelled a pistol at my head.
"For Margaret's sake, sir," I pleaded in low tones. "Let me go!" She had
flown like a bird across to us, and so heard me.
"I had hoped you thought better of me, Master Wheatman," she said coldly,
and went back to her watching.
The sergeant heard, or at least understood, what had been said in the
room. We heard him say, "You know your job. Fifty guineas for Wheatman,
dead or alive. Any man who touches the girl will be flogged bare to the
bones." Then we heard him walk off along the corridor.
The dragoons without made no attempt on the door, and we joined Margaret
at the window. Hardly had we got there when half a dozen dragoons dashed
out of the porch and ran for the road. The Colonel flung the window open
and emptied both his pistols at them, but they zigzagged like hares and
the shots appeared to be thrown away. In the road they halted, formed a
line in open order, and levelled their carbines at the window. All three
of us moved aside, the Colonel tugging Margaret with him to the right
while I hopped to the left.
"Take it easy, Oliver," he said very good-humouredly. "Until they think
of the wagon we're safe enough on this side. These walls would almost
stand up to a carronade."
With a clash the first bullet came through the window and knocked a huge
splinter off a bedpost. There were six shots without, and six bullets
spattered in a small area opposite.
"That's quite good shooting," said the Colonel. "Much better than I
expected from such poor stuff."
I told him what Jack had said about the mixed quality of Brocton's
dragoons. These good shots, I explained, were picked men off the Ridgeley
estates, probably gamekeepers and bailiffs.
"Very like," he said. "They're used to shooting but not to fighting.
Rabbits are more in their line."
There was no stir in the passage, and I wondered what the job was these
men had in hand. The fusillade at the window was kept up unceasingly,
generally in single shots, sometimes in twos and threes. The barricade
took on a ragged appearance. I occupied my mind in thoughts of Margaret.
She was in the corner, beyond her father.
The bullets had by now nearly cleared the window of glass, fragments of
which covered the floor of the room. Through the cracking and spluttering
we at last heard the noise of a wagon moving. The Colonel and I leaped up
and peered round the edge of the window. It was being pulled by two
horses, and was shifted till it was exactly opposite the window, and to my
surprise some twelve feet distant. The sacks made a firm platform level
with the window-sill. Flush with the window it would have made an
admirable means of attack, but why the space between?
While the wagon was being put in position, there was a cessation of
firing. We saw the six dragoons from the road climbing on to the wagon,
while as many again joined them from the inn. The Colonel said, "Now's our
chance!" and fired carefully. One man, who was poised on the rear wheel,
fell into the road and hopped round to the back of the wagon holding his
right foot in his hand; another, already mounted, sprawled full length on
the sacks.
"That's the way," he said, with much satisfaction, and stepped aside to
reload. "See if you can improve on it."
By this, under orders from the sergeant, two or three dragoons were
creeping under the wagon to fire from behind the wheels. I dropped a man
standing at the horses' heads and then, in the nick of time and on second
thoughts, made sure of the mare and hit her in the neck. She squealed,
kicked, and plunged, and the other horse sharing her fears, they began to
drag the wagon off. The sergeant and two or three men leaped at them and
managed to quiet them, and then took them out of the traces to save
further trouble of the sort. The Colonel, meanwhile, having reloaded,
brought down another dragoon with one shot, and ripped open a sack with
another. It was barley.
For perhaps a minute the window had been as safe as her corner, and
Margaret had been quietly watching the scene. Now, with seven or eight men
lying on the top of the sacks, with a stout row of them piled in front as
a bulwark, it was time for us to run to cover again. This time, of her own
accord, she came my side, and nestled beyond me in the nook between the
wall and my body.
The men in the passage still made no sign.
"Slids, Oliver," said the Colonel, "I can't see this ugly devil's game
yet, but, whatever it is, you came near to spoiling it. Damme, it was a
good idea to pepper the horse. Curse me! Where were my fifty years of
soldiering that I couldn't think of it?"
"I suppose it comes from my being--"
The sweetest and whitest fingers in the world closed my mouth, and
Margaret, thinking that I was on the verge of backsliding, whispered in my
ear, "The readiest-witted gentleman in England."
I tingled with the joy of her touch, and turned to her so that I might go
on into the coming fight with her last shade of emotion burnt into my
memory. A stream of lead poured through the window, but the spluttering of
bullets on the walls of the room had no more effect on me than the
pattering of hailstones.
"May I finish my sentence, madam?"
"Not as you intended, sir."
"I can't go back on old Bloggs' teaching, madam."
She pouted and frowned, both at once, and the Colonel bawled through the
noise of the fusillade, "Being what?"
"Fond of Virgil," roared I back again.
Margaret laughed. Could a nightingale laugh, it would laugh as Margaret
laughed then.
Before the music of it died away the sergeant showed his hand, and death
at its grizzliest grinned through the window. A great mass of damp,
smouldering straw, lifted on pikels, was thrust into the window-frame,
filling it completely, and thick wreaths of dense, foul smoke eddied into
the room, while through the straw the rain of bullets poured on, smashing
and splintering on walls and ceiling, door and barricade.
The Colonel slashed and poked at the straw with his rapier. Telling
Margaret to crouch on the floor, I crawled on my belly and fetched the
bed-staff, which stood in its accustomed corner of the chimney-piece. It
made a much more serviceable tool for the job, and I flung it across to
the Colonel, who seized it and worked it like a blackamoor till he was
almost the colour of one, and had, to judge by his voice and demeanour,