The Yeoman Adventurer
clear of the country."
"The different personal ends for which you are anxious to turn traitor
seem innumerable, my lord!"
He met the taunt as if it had been a flip with a straw, and only said,
"Is it a bargain?"
"It is not," I replied emphatically.
If his life rather than his lands had depended on the recovery of the
letter he could not have been more eager. For a long time he pleaded and
wrestled with me; arguing, bullying, imploring, threatening, turn and turn
about, but to no result. I would not go back on my casual word to Master
Freake. The letter was important to him, and he would save Margaret and
the Colonel, and me too, when the inevitable hour of need should come at
last. Money was power, and lands were more than money. Acres meant votes,
and with votes at your command you had ministers at your beck. I was sure
of Master Freake. Why bother about my lord Brocton?
At last he played his last card. "You shall have the Upper Hanyards back
again, Master Wheatman," he quavered.
The rascal earl, his father, had juggled more than a thousand acres of
the Hanyards away from my father by some musty process of law and a venal
bench. The reference angered me, and I cried loudly, "You shall not have
it back at any price!"
He looked at the window, and paled as he thought of the sentinel ears
without. Then he went off, vomiting curses.
That day week, she brought me a shepherd's pie for dinner, very well made
too, and a mug of ale not wholly unworthy of the name. She put them down,
looked at me in a measure womanly, and smiled. It was a root of promise
and fruit would follow. Any change would be welcome. I was ragged, dirty,
galled, cramped, and bearded with a red stubble. She called me 'Carrots'
in derision.
I was right. At evening she brought me up a dish of tea, and when I
lifted it off the table to take a drink of it, there was beneath it a
paper folded letter-fashion.
I steadied myself, drank my tea with only moderate haste, and then
cautiously palmed my treasure and walked to the window. Standing with my
back to the door, so that the sentry, who was given to popping his head in
to have a look at me, could not catch me unawares, I opened the paper. It
was a letter. It was written by a woman. The woman was Margaret.
"You will be taken to-morrow to Carlisle. On the way friends will rescue
you and bring you to me. Fear nothing, say nothing, and all will be well.
Till to-morrow, dear Oliver. Destroy this. MARG. W."
It went hard against the grain to destroy this precious missive. I hid in
the corner, and kissed it ravenously a hundred times. How straight and
true the pen had ploughed its way across the paper! It was just such
writing as I had expected of her, the resolute escription of her sweet,
resolute self. Nor was the problem of destroying it easy to solve, since I
had no fire, and there was no sure hiding-place accessible to my manacled
hands. I mastered the difficulty heroically by eating the letter with my
bread and butter.
It was even harder to pretend to be dull and sluggish with such a whirl
of happy thoughts in my mind. I was her "dear Oliver," dear enough to make
her risk her own life in saving mine. That she would plan wisely and
execute swiftly, there was no shadow of doubt. This time tomorrow we
should be together again.
The night dragged through at last, and the first glimmer of dawn found me
alert and hopeful. She brought my usual breakfast at the usual time, and
smiled again, but put her finger on her lips to warn me to be silent and
careful.
She went downstairs, and left to myself again, I grew furious to think
that Margaret would see me so, a regular wild man of the woods--_quantum
mutatus ab illo Hectare_. But my ravings ceased at the sound of
preparations without. My room was at the back of the house, but I heard
the noise of wheels, and hoof-beats, and the harsh swearing of the
sergeant. By and by he came noisily upstairs, burst into my room, and
curtly ordered me downstairs.
Blithely I followed him. Try how I would I could not hide my joy, and,
seeing that he noted it, I said in explanation, "Anything for a change,
sergeant!"
"You'll wish yourself back here soon enough, blast ye!" he growled.
"We'll stretch your neck for you till your eyes drop out, you swine!"
"You dear, good, Christian soul!" I simpered.
For answer, he kicked me savagely, and then bundled me downstairs, out of
the house, and into the road. Here a two-horsed coach was in waiting, with
two dragoons and a corporal in front and two more behind. One of the rear
men was holding a horse, and to my annoyance the sergeant got into the
coach after me, bawled out a command, and off our party started.
I stumbled into a corner and sat huddled up, straining my eyes ahead to
catch what was to come. Margaret's information was clearly correct. We
took the road north, passed through Penrith without a halt, and out again,
still on the turnpike, proof that Carlisle was to be our destination. The
city was obviously now in the Duke's power.
Mile after mile we covered apace, and at every curve and cross-road I
peered ahead and around with my heart in my mouth. One point in my favour
was the desolate nature of the country, exactly fitted for such a
stratagem as was in hand. On the right the gloomy sky was blotted out by
jagged masses of gloomier hills. On the left the country varied between
flat and upland, but was hardly less uninviting.
"Where d'ye think y're going?" asked the sergeant, joggling me with his
spurred heel to make me look at him.
"No idea," said I.
"Blast ye. I wish y'had," he growled viciously, and I turned away to smile.
We passed through a village littered with the Duke's baggage wagons and
pretty full of soldiery. This chilled my spirit somewhat, for it looked as
if we were about to run into the rear of the Royal army. Outside the
village, however, we again had the road to ourselves, and a mile farther
on dropped to a walk to climb a long slant of road.
Whenever the road curved my way I had seen the corporal and his two men
riding from fifty to a hundred yards ahead of us. Not very far up the
slope we came on a farmstead lying flush on the roadside. In the yard were
some thirty head of shaggy black cattle, of the northern kind seldom seen
in our parts and therefore attractive to a farmer's eye. A farm-hand
leaning over the gate had some noisy gossip with the dragoons as they
passed, and bawled his news to a group of men sitting at meat under a
hovel. It was a poor enough place to support so many men, for the
farm-wife, who came to her kitchen door to see what the clatter was about,
was of no better seeming than a yokel's wife with us. My eyes were on her
curiously when the man on the gate skipped off and flung it open right
across the muzzles of our horses.
In the tick of a clock the whole scene changed. The men under the hovel
rushed out, fell on the cattle, thrashed them mercilessly with great
battoons, yelled at them like maniacs, and drove them in a shoving,
bellowing, maddened mass into the road, which here had a stone wall on the
side opposite the farm. When the torrent was fairly going, two of the
supposed yokels snatched up carbines, climbed on to the hovel, and opened
fire on the dragoons in our rear.
The master hand of the Colonel was in this beyond a doubt. With a loud
curse, the sergeant, who was on the side away from the farm, opened the
door and was for leaping out. He bethought himself and half turned, one
hand on the door and one foot on the step, to look an evil inquiry at me.
That half-turn was his undoing. Part of the living, struggling torrent of
cattle was shoved round our way and came sweeping by. One beast brushed
the door open even as he glared at me and tumbled him outwards. As he
twisted in his fall another drove her sharp horns clean into him, and
shook and twirled him off again like a terrier playing with a rat. The
rearguard turned tail and fled. The vanguard had simply been swept off the
scene, and I saw them spurring up the slope with the cattle surging after
them. The plan had been thought out to a nicety and had worked to
perfection. I was free, free for Margaret. I sat down again dizzied and
happy.
My rescuers took no notice of me but ran down the road in a body and
stood round the sergeant. After some excited talk they carried him back,
called on me to aid, and rammed him into the coach, where he lay huddled
on the seat in front of me. Without so much as a word to me, the commander
pulled our driver off the box, ordered a man up in his place, climbed
after him, and said briefly, "Go like the devil!"
The carriage turned up a rough lane which ran eastward out of the high
road opposite the farm, leaving most of my rescuers standing uncertain in
a group. The driver cut his horses savagely with his whip, and we went at
a hard gallop. The jolting tumbled me about in the coach, and I had hard
work, shackled as I was, to keep the sergeant on the seat. He was still
alive, though so hideously injured that death could only be a question of
minutes. Where we were going and why they were carrying him along with us,
were questions it was useless to bother about. Margaret would explain
everything when we met. I could make little of the men who had rescued me.
They were clearly not farm-hands, for they were well armed, the guns I had
seen looked to me to be military carbines, and they had carried through
their business briskly and intelligently.
I heard the men on the box talking, but their speech was only about the
road and the speed. The country got rougher and wilder; the distant hills
were losing their clear-cut, rolling outlines, and becoming neighbours and
obstacles. The horses were thrashed unmercifully, but at times even the
well-plied whip could get no more than a crawl out of them.
The sergeant's end was at hand. He rallied, as men commonly do before
they put foot in the black river, and looked at me unrecognizingly. He
closed his eyes again, and began to writhe and mutter strange words.
Suddenly he cried plainly, "Curse the swine! Another wedge, ye damned
chicken-heart!" He looked at me again, and this time made out who I was,
and cursed loathsomely in his disappointment.
"D'ye know where y're going?" he ended, leering wickedly.
"No," said I.
"Blast ye! I wish ye did!" He gurgled this almost jocosely, as if it were
a pet bit of humour.
"Do you know where you are going?" I asked solemnly.
"To hell," he cried, and, after a spout of blood that spattered me as I
leaned over him, went.
The carriage stopped and, before I could rise to see why, the door was
opened and some one without said politely, "This is indeed a pleasure,
Master Wheatman!"
It was my lord Brocton.
* * * * *
It would be foolish to pretend that I was not bitten to the bone, and I
can only hope that I did not give outward expression to a tithe of the
chagrin and dismay that possessed me. Being commanded to do so, I got out
of the coach without a word and looked around.
The rough road along which we had been travelling ran on through a slit
in the hills. Where we stood a bridle-path parted from it at a sharp angle
and made its way over the lower skirts of the hill country. It was a
desolate, dreary spot where, as I suspected, the king's writ ran not and
where, therefore, a man might be done to death with all conveniency.
Master Freake would be useless to me now, and my chiefest enemy had me at
his will.
There was no delay. A long cloak was put over me, so disposed as to hide
my fetters, and I was lifted on a spare horse led by one of the
new-comers. The skill with which the affair had been planned was shown by
the fact that this horse, to accommodate my shackled legs, had been
saddled as for a lady.