From far ahead came the faint rattle of hoofs on the hard road. I pulled up, and, a moment later, Margaret and the Colonel stopped beside me.
"What is it?" asked the latter.
"Horse coming this way, sir," was my reply. The sounds were already plainer. For a full minute he listened carefully. "A good number of them, and making a smart pace," he said. "It can only be Kingston"s advance guard falling back. Most likely the van of the Highlanders has beaten up their quarters. Once past them we shall be--h.e.l.lo! Slids! What"s that?
Reinforcements! Egad. Oliver, we"re between the hammer and the anvil."
He turned his head round sharply and so did Margaret and I. From behind us came again the unmistakable rattle of a body of horse. We were trapped completely.
"This is d.a.m.ned annoying," said the Colonel. He looked casually around, as indifferently as he would have looked round the guest-room of the "Rising Sun," and added, "Follow me, and ride as if the devil were at your tail."
He turned off into the bare, flat country, and we after him. How we rode!
He was making for a little group of trees, some dozen wind-sown pines, stuck like a forlorn picket in enemy country a stone"s-throw from the road. We got there in a bunch, for there was no time for Sultan"s pace to count.
"d.a.m.n the moon!" he said, and dismounted. "But this is better than nothing. Take off Margaret"s saddle, Oliver."
I got down, and a.s.sisted Margaret to dismount. She thanked me, briefly and smilingly, as unperturbed as the gaunt pine beneath which she stood.
The Colonel and I changed the saddles, and in a few seconds Margaret was on Sultan. I asked him in vain to take the sorrel and leave the mare to me, for she was getting restive, and the Colonel was not quite so able as I was with a strange horse. I insisted, however, in taking off my coat and wrapping it about the mare"s head, and, being thus blanketed, she gave us no further trouble. By the Colonel"s orders, Margaret, on Sultan, took her place between us, heading for the open country, while he and I turned to the road. The thin, straggling pine-branches cast but little shadow, and I knew it was next to impossible for us to pa.s.s unnoticed.
"Now, Madge," said the Colonel, "it"s bound to come to a fight. As soon as the fun begins, off you go like the wind into this bog-hole in front of you, and in five minutes you"ll be out of danger. Make a detour round to the road again, keep the moon behind your back, and push on to the nearest inn. Oliver and I will join you there, if so G.o.d wills. If we don"t, you"re on the Chester road. Have you your money still?"
"Yes, dad."
"You understand, Madge?"
"Quite clearly."
"Then kiss me, sweetheart."
She kissed him without a word, and turned to look goodbye to me. For a moment I went all aquiver with emotion. This wonderful new life of mine had at times to be lived in the outskirts and suburbs of death.
Fortunately, a thought came into my head, and I tugged out the leathern bag and thrust it into her hand.
"Don"t leave that under the bed," said I, and, being very bold, as one may be with death at one"s door, I drew her gloved hand, with the bag in it, towards me, and kissed it. She said nothing to me, but the light in her eyes was like moonlight on the dancing surface of a mountain spring.
"Look to your pistols, Oliver," ordered the Colonel briefly and crisply.
"See your tuck slips easy in the scabbard. Another minute will decide. You and I can easily give Madge all the start Sultan requires."
"Easily, sir," I answered stoutly.
"Good lad!" said the Colonel.
And Margaret, leaning across until her lips were near my cheek as I bent to see what she wanted, said, for the third time, "Well done, fisherman!"
I laughed lightly and was glad, for was not this calm, brave, splendid woman thinking of how we two had met?
From the first c.o.c.k of the sorrel"s ears to this so characteristic remark of Margaret"s could not have been five minutes, and now, although owing to the downward slope to our left I have mentioned, and its corresponding slope to the right, neither body was yet in sight, they were so nearly on us that differences between them became obvious. The southern troup was small, was not travelling beyond a smart trot, and was, so far as the men were concerned, absolutely quiet. The body from the north was large, was forcing a hot gallop, and much noise and shouting came from the troopers.
It was plain that we were in for it. The men from Newcastle were no doubt coming north as a reinforcement, but it was absurd to suppose that they had not been told of our doings and of our escape northwards. They had not overtaken us, and we must be on the road somewhere. The men from the north had not met us. Never since the world began had two and two been easier to put together. There was only one place for us to be in and this was it. A short parley, a glance our way, and an overwhelming force would dash at the picket of pines.
The bare road lay there in the moonlight, half a mile of it in clear view on either hand. The two bodies came in sight within a few seconds of each other, and the Colonel snapped his fingers and chuckled.
From the north a wild rush of spurring, flogging, shouting, cursing hors.e.m.e.n, about a hundred of them. No order, no discipline, no soldiership--nothing but mad haste and madder fear.
The mare began to plunge, and the Colonel, leaping off, nearly strangled her in the coat. The sorrel got uneasy but gave me no real trouble. Sultan took not the slightest notice of the din behind him, and leisurely cropped the tough bussocks of gra.s.s at his feet.
I looked to the road again. The southern body was small, not more than a score, compact, riding smartly but with military order and precision. The man at their head, the officer in command, no doubt, spurred on and began to shout at the oncoming northerners. He might as well have spoken fair words to an avalanche, and the men behind him began to waver and most of them pulled up. It was useless. The torrent swept into them and bore them backward, tumbling some of them over, men and horses together, but incorporating most of them in its own madness. In less than five minutes the last batch of dragooners had cursed and spurred themselves out of sight, and the bright moon shone down on a road once more bare and white save for a few scattered patches of black.
The Colonel uncovered the mare"s head and nuzzled her. All he said was, but that very gleefully, "Geordie, my boy, I"ll be routing you out of St.
James"s within the fortnight. I"ll learn you to neglect the King of Sweden"s Colonels! Damme, Oliver, it made me think of Pharaoh"s kine--one lot eating the other up. Now, sweetheart my Madge, we"ll have your pretty eyes a-bye-bye in no time."
"I never saw anything so funny in my life," said Margaret. "On with your coat, Oliver, before you take cold."
From all of which I learned to take, as they did, the fat with the lean in soldiering, and not to care a bra.s.s farthing which it was. Still, I was as yet so young at the game, that, though I was careful to swagger it out and say nothing, I did wonder why the body from the south was so small.
And I wonder as I write whether it was or was not the mistake of my life merely to wonder then.
CHAPTER XIV
"WAR HAS ITS RISKS"
I slept unsoundly and in s.n.a.t.c.hes. Margaret was in the room beneath me, "dreaming in Italian," thought I, in unhappy imitation of her dainty gibe at her father. A problem was on my mind, and that was ever with me an enemy to sleep. I meant being the best of soldiers, and this that worried me was a military problem. To be short, I could not help asking myself, "Were the dragoons from the south intended as a reinforcement to the horse from the north?" And somehow I could not think they were. As the top-dog spirit in me put it: "It was like sending Jack to reinforce me. _Quod est absurdum_."
Time the Explainer permits me to be frank. There was this other side to my problem that I could not bring myself to be sure the Colonel"s escape had come merely by happy chance. He was no party to contriving it, of that I never doubted, but it did look like a contrivance. We had been at the "Rising Sun" for six hours or more. Stone, the nearest head-quarters of c.u.mberland"s forces, was only nine miles south of it, yet no attempt had been made to follow the fugitive. No, thought I again, that"s wrong. Weir was sent on his track and actually found him. But this was as useless, so it seemed, as sending twenty dragoons, hundreds being available, to reinforce a thousand stout horse. There was no proportion between the ends proposed and the means adopted.
If the handful of dragoons were not a reinforcement, it was a pursuit of us, and this posed another problem. Why had the pursuit been allowed to flag all the afternoon and evening, to be taken up again far on in the night? What fresh fact, if any, had determined it? I could think of none, nor, on reflection, was one wanted, since both Master Freake and Jack had last night witnessed to the worn-out state of Brocton"s horses.
Consequently his dragoons would have been sent after the Colonel earlier had they been fit. Their coming, when fit, proved their anxiety to retake him. Therefore he was not allowed to escape, and the conclusion of my argument hit its major premise clean in the teeth.
"Oliver, my boy," said I to myself, "say a bit of Virgil and go to sleep.
These matters are beyond you."
I picked on a pa.s.sage and started mumbling it to myself. It was a lucky hit, for when I had in solemn whispers rolled off the great lines in the sixth Aeneid which foretell the work and glory of Rome, I thought of my Lord Ridgeley, thiever by cunning process of law of most of my ancient patrimony, and his blackguard son, my Lord Brocton, l.u.s.tfully hunting the proud, gracious woman beneath, and I said grandiosely to myself, "Rome"s destiny is thine too, Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards, and these bet.i.tled scullions are the proud ones you shall war down."
The notion was so soothing that I fell asleep again.
I have leaped over uninteresting but by no means unimportant events. We were staying the night at a wayside hostel, called the "Red Bull,"
situated at the point where a cross-road cut the main road. We were still in Staffordshire, a matter on which Margaret had laughingly placed the utmost importance, though an urchin, standing by the rude signpost, could have flung a pebble into Cheshire. Houseroom was of the narrowest, and I was tucked away in the attics, in a room I had to crawl about in two-double, walking upright being out of the question. It was the grown-up daughter"s room, and she had been bundled out to make place for me, a fact I did not learn till it was beyond need of remedy. The la.s.s had a good pleasant woman to mother, but her father, the host, was an ill-conditioned, surly runt, whose only good point was a still tongue.
Margaret was in the room below, and her father next to her along a narrow gangway. From my attic I got down to this gangway by means of a staircase hardly to be told from a ladder. The gangway, just past the Colonel"s door, became a little landing whence three or four steps led down to a larger landing, from which one could mount up to the other and corresponding half of the house or descend to the entrance hall with which the various rooms of the ground floor connected.
I awoke again in a dim dull dawn. Tired of these bouts of wakefulness I got off the bed--for I was lying full-dressed even to my boots--and crept softly to the window. I would keep watch and ward for Margaret, as a true knight oweth to do. Then, if my obscure misgivings were unfounded, I should at any rate have done my duty.
There had been a slight fall of snow, enough to cover the ground and bring everything up into sharp relief. My window was a dormant-window, its sill being about four feet from the eaves. I flung it open, careful not to make a sound, pushed out head and shoulders, and took stock.
I dipped my fingers in the snow and found there was near an inch of it.
The "Red Bull" stood back from the road, and on each side of the inn proper, outhouses and stables jutted out to the wayside. Drawn up under a hovel on the left was a huge wagon piled with sacks, probably of barley bound for Leek, a town renowned for its ale.