“How’s that?”
“Freshly horsed,” explains Joan.
The troopers—they were all around her by this—swore ’twas a lie; but luckily, being down in the hollow, could not see over the next ridge. They began a string of questions all together: but at last a little tun bellied sergeant call’d “Silence!” and asked the girl, “did she loan the fellow a horse?”
Here I will quote her again:—
“‘Sir, to thee,’ I answer’d, ‘no loan at all, but fair swap for our Grey Robin.’
“‘That’s a lie,’ he says; ’an’ I won’t believe thee.’
“‘Might so well,’ says I; ‘but go to stable, an’ see for thysel’ (Never had grey horse to my name, Jack; but, thinks I, that’s his’n lookout.)”
They went, did these simple troopers, to look at the stable, and sure enough, there was no Grey Robin. Nevertheless, some amongst them had logic enough to take this as something less than proof convincing, and spent three hours and more ransacking the house and barn, and searching the tor and the moors below it. I learn’d too, that Joan had come in for some rough talk—to which she put a stop, as she told me, by offering to fight any man Jack of them for the buttons on his buffcoat. And at length, about sundown, they gave up the hunt, and road away over the moors toward Warleggan, having (as the girl heard them say) to be at Braddock before night.
“Where is this Braddock?”
“Nigh to Lord Mohun’s house at Boconnoc: seven mile away to the south, and seven mile or so from Bodmin, as a crow flies.”