"I thought, maybe, your honour would know about it."
"Don't think. Roderick Salt dead? Tell me this instant, or—"
"He was drowned, sir, in a ditch, they tell me, but two months after he sailed with his company of Foot Guards, in the spring of this year. It seems 'twas a ditch that the Marshal Turenne had the misfortune to forget about—"
"My hat—where is it? Quick!"
Already Captain Barker had plucked the napkin from his throat, caught up his sword from a chair, and was buckling on the belt in a tremendous hurry.
"But your honour forgets the wig, which is but half curled; and your honour's face shaved on the one side only."
The hunchback's answer was to snatch his wig from between the apprentice's tongs, clap it on his head, ram his hat on the top of it, and flounce out at the shop door.
The streets were full of folk, but he passed through them at an amazing speed. His natural gait on shipboard was a kind of anapaestic dance—two short steps and a long—and though the crowd interrupted its cadence and coerced him to a quick bobbing motion, as of a bottle in a choppy sea, it hardly affected his pace. Here and there he snapped out a greeting to some ship's captain or townsman of his acquaintance, or growled testily at a row of soldiers bearing down on him three abreast. His angry green eyes seemed to clear a path before him, in spite of the grins which his hump and shambling legs excited among strangers. In this way he darted along High Street, turned up by the markets, crossed Church Street into West Street, and passed under the great gate by which the London Road left the town.
Beyond this gate the road ran through a tall ravelin and out upon a breezy peninsula between the river and the open sea. And here Captain Barker halted and, tugging off hat and wig, wiped his crown with a silk handkerchief.
Over the reedy marsh upon his right, where a windmill waved its lazy arms, a score of larks were singing. To his left the gulls mewed across the cliffs and the remoter sandbanks that thrust up their yellow ridges under the ebb-tide. The hum of the little town sounded drowsily behind him.