“I am going to get you drink,” Hugh answered, and jumping down from his horse entered the tavern and made for the common room. There he found a surly tapster, and, trying hard to be civil and yet not abject, begged: “Can you give me a glass of aqua vitæ? I’ve a wounded friend here—”
To which the tapster simply responded: “Pack!”
Hugh gave back a step or two, and then, with the feeling that Strangwayes might be dying and he must do something, however desperate, pulled out his pistol. “I must have that aqua vitæ,” he said quietly. “Either you give it me or I go fetch it. Make up your mind.”
Instead the tapster drew away to the door, bawling for assistance till he roused up another man and a maid and the hostess herself. Hugh, with his back to the wall and the pistol in his hand, felt unjustified and ashamed, but, the thought of Strangwayes nerving him, repeated his request to the hostess. She fell to rating him shrilly for a bullying swashbuckler to frighten a poor woman so, and, as the men would not check her and Hugh could not use his pistol for argument here, she was like to keep it up some time. Happily the maid, who had peered out at the window, broke in with a glowing account of the fine horses and the poor wounded gentleman, whereat the landlady, after boxing the wench’s ears for gaping out of doors, bounced over to the casement. The sight of Dick Strangwayes or of the horses must have softened her, for after an instant’s gazing she began to rate the tapster and bade him fetch what the young gentleman required.
When Hugh came out triumphant with the glass of spirits he found the rest of the inn people gathered about the horses, and the hostess very pressingly urging Strangwayes to light and rest at her house. She was but too glad to help a gentleman fallen on misfortune, she explained, especially when the gentleman served the king, bless him! His Majesty and all his men had passed through there and some of them had lain in her house only the night before.
“Then we’ll soon be up with your friends, Dick,” Hugh urged, trying to speak cheerfully.
Strangwayes just nodded, then drank the hostess’s health in the aqua vitæ, and with a flicker of energy bade Hugh get to his saddle. As they left the little knot of staring people behind them, he turned his face toward Hugh and, forcing his drawn lips into a smile, asked: “You raided those inn folk? You’re learning bravely, my Spanish Puritan.”
Then he became silent and suffered the gallant pace at which he had set out to slacken. The black showed a tendency to veer from one side of the road to the other, till at last, not above two miles from the tavern, Strangwayes dropped the bridle rein into Hugh’s ready hand. “You must lead the horse a bit,” he said wearily. “I’ll rest me.”
Of those last miles Hugh kept only blurred recollections, among which the dazzle of sunlight upon the firm road beneath the horses’ feet, the sight of men laboring in tilled fields, and the smell of moist woods, recurred vaguely. Through all the shifting changes of the wayside Strangwayes, as he sat bowing over the pommel of his saddle with his pallid face hidden on his breast, was alone a living reality.
The long piece of woodland ended at last, and across the fields the roofs of a village came in sight. To the left horses grazing in a meadow whickered to the passing chargers, and then the riders trotted slowly in among the houses. There was a smith’s shop, Hugh remembered, about which lounged men in great boots and buff jackets, and before the village inn were more in the same attire. Hugh reined up there, scarcely knowing what he purposed, but before he could dismount a young man with long light brown hair, who wore a scarlet sash across his jacket, advanced from the inn door. “King’s men?” the stranger asked. “Why, what has befallen here?”