‘All right, Master Morality,’ quoth he, ‘I must e’en unlearn some of the tricks of my trade. Od’s feet, man, if ye object to me, what the henker would ye think of some whom I have known? However, let that pass. It is time that we were at the wars, for our good swords will not bide in their scabbards.
“The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty,
For want of fighting was grown rusty,
And ate into itself for lack
Of somebody to hew and hack.”
You cannot think a thought but old Samuel hath been before you.’
‘Surely we shall be at the end of this dreary plain presently,’ Reuben cried. ‘Its insipid flatness is enough to set the best of friends by the ears. We might be in the deserts of Libya instead of his most graceless Majesty’s county of Wiltshire.’
‘There is smoke over yonder, upon the side of that hill,’ said Saxon, pointing to the southward.
‘Methinks I see one straight line of houses there,’ I observed, shading my eyes with my hand. ‘But it is distant, and the shimmer of the sun disturbs the sight.’
‘It must be the hamlet of Hindon,’ said Reuben. ‘Oh, the heat of this steel coat! I wonder if it were very un-soldierly to slip it off and tie it about Dido’s neck. I shall be baked alive else, like a crab in its shell. How say you, illustrious, is it contravened by any of those thirty-nine articles of war which you bear about in your bosom?’
‘The bearing of the weight of your harness, young man,’ Saxon answered gravely, ‘is one of the exercises of war, and as such only attainable by such practice as you are now undergoing. You have many things to learn, and one of them is not to present petronels too readily at folk’s heads when you are on horseback. The jerk of your charger’s movement even now might have drawn your trigger, and so deprived Monmouth of an old and tried soldier.’
‘There would be much weight in your contention,’ my friend answered, ‘were it not that I now bethink me that I had forgot to recharge my pistol since discharging it at that great yellow beast yesternight.’
Decimus Saxon shook his head sadly. ‘I doubt we shall never make a soldier of you,’ he remarked. ‘You fall from your horse if the brute does bit change his step, you show a levity which will not jump with the gravity of the true soldado, you present empty petronels as a menace, and finally, you crave permission to tie your armour—armour which the Cid himself might be proud to wear—around the neck of your horse. Yet you have heart and mettle, I believe, else you would not be here.’