"Shall we?" said the wayfarer. "I think not. Listen, my lord."
The rousing autumn wind brought indeed a strange distant rumour on its wings, and the fiddler imposed silence on his restless fingers and stood still himself, leaning his ear.
Once more Steven arrested his horse. There is nothing so infectious as the curiosity of the ear. The flapping gust fell as they halted; and then the sounds which it had carried over the crest of the knoll seemed to be repeated with much greater distinctness from the vale in their rear.
"What is it?" asked he.
It was a sound like the beat of giant storm-rain upon forest leaves, only that it was measured at repeated intervals by rhythmic jingle and clink. Even as he spoke, Steven heard a crisp drumming of hoofs separate itself from the confusion; then, upon the ring of a commanding voice, the thunder-wave of advance broke itself into silence. And in the midst of this silence a succession of cracking shots suddenly pattered close on one another, as beads dropping from a string.
"Stand back!" cried the fiddler. And, suiting the action to the word, he seized the horse by the bit and forced it backwards into the ditch that girt the road on the side of the fields.
"But what is it?" asked Steven once more, as clamour within the woods rose again: a hideous medley of human voices wrangling like angry beasts, of plunging and neighing of horses, crackling of boughs and thud of iron hoofs. The fiddler dilated his nostrils. He stood leaning against the flank of the grey, his right hand still firmly on the bit. A fine blue vapour, pungent of smell, was oozing between the dark firs.
"Have you never smelt it before, you innocent?" said he, looking up at the rider, and his sunburnt face was kindled by stern fires. "Yet there's scarce a square rood of Europe, these twelve years, that has not known the smoke of this holocaust. It is war, man!"
The words were still on his lips when the placid front of the forest before them was shaken and pierced and rent in a hundred places. Red-coated hussars, with flying blue dolmans—bareheaded most, but some with huge shako and plume at a dishevelled angle—broke covert along the whole line, crashing through the underwood, leaping, it seemed, one upon the other, each man inclining in his saddle and spurring towards the downward slope at a mad gallop.
Steven's horse shivered under him. It had, no doubt, in its youth been a charger: it was now seized with martial ardour, and flinging up its head to shake off the fiddler's grip, displayed such a strong intention to join in the race—which no doubt it conceived to be a glorious charge—that a less practised rider would have found it hard to keep the saddle.