Something, familiar to those days, was wanting, however; and the solitary rider peered for the something, unwilling to believe that a tract so lonely could be innocent of a certain unchancy landmark. He had already loosened his pistols in the holsters, and was riding with a greater regard for surprises.
He topped a hillock, and “Ah!” quoth he; “I could not be mistaken.”
On a high swell of ground, right in his path, as it seemed, a structure like a massive clothes’-horse, open at an angle, stood up against the sky. From its crowning beams a short slack or two of chain depended; but these were quit for the time of any ugly burden—a void that by no means pleased the traveller.
“When the boggart tumbles, the crows re-gather,” he murmured sententiously; but he set to singing again, though with an eye alert for mishaps.
Nothing occurred, however; nor had he sighted a solitary soul moving in the breadth of the wide landscape, when—without a change being obvious in the character of the latter—he found himself descending a steep slope to a little long township of queer and ancient houses.
Here at a pleasant small tavern—on whose sign-board, as he approached, he read the legend “The First Inn” (the reverse slyly exhibited, to the eternal merriment of chuckleheads, the obvious antiperistasis of “The Last Out”)—he drew rein, and found he had reached the village of Stockbridge, which was in truth that halting-place on his last stage, from which he was, as he had learned, to take a by-road, some five or six miles, to his destination.
Into the tap he strode; and there were a few gaping rustics swilling their muddy quarts, and the landlord, a wizened, bent-stick of a man, behind the bar.
“Oblige me by sending some one to look after my horse,” said Mr. Tuke to this person.
The person shifted a glass or two, covertly eyeing the stranger through rheumy slits of lids; but answer made he none.
Mr. Tuke repeated his request—still without result. He turned sharply on one of the grinning hinds.