“Yes, they should have taken some horses from the rebels by this,” Hugh replied, with a nod toward a corpse with an orange sash that lay on the edge of the roadway. He stubbornly told himself it was only another monument to the Royalist fighting quality, and tried to believe he had nearly deadened sympathy in him and calloused his senses to the horror of what he must endure if he would follow this life he had chosen.
They faced westward and tramped along the road, but what with ruts and mire it proved heavier walking than the fields. “Faith, I’m weary of this,” Frank grumbled. “How much farther to Kineton?”
“Let’s bear off on the other side,” suggested Hugh, peering through the gathering twilight. “Yonder’s a bit of a hollow and it may be easier going.”
They crossed a piece of open level, and, holding this the quickest way, jumped down the slight pitch at its farther edge. As they recovered footing, they perceived close before them in the lee of the bank two bodies lying motionless, one of which seemed that of an officer by its better clothes and of a rebel by its orange sash. It was the first officer of Essex’s army they had yet noted among the dead, and, with a sudden fear that it might be one of his own kindred, Hugh bent over the corpse. Finding, to his relief, that the face was strange to him, he was turning away, when his eyes chanced to rest upon the other body, that of a hulking common foot soldier. As he gazed he thought to see a slight tremor pass over it, so, stepping to the man as he lay on his face, he shook him by the shoulder.
At the touch the fellow suddenly scrambled to his knees. “Don’t kill me, master,” he whined. “Give me quarter.”
Hugh had started back a step or two and pulled out his pistol; the man was not even scratched, he perceived, but had feigned dead. Then he noted a basket-hilted sword with a leathern baldric that had been concealed beneath him as he lay, and he noted, too, that not only did the dead officer wear no sword, but his pockets had been turned inside out. “So that’s your trade, is it?” Hugh cried. “Robbing the dead of your own party, eh?”
“I’ll never do so no more,” whimpered the fellow. “Don’t ’ee shoot.”
The craven tone of the creature harked back to something in Hugh’s memory; he leaned a little forward and studied the man’s bearded, low-browed face, then drew back with his pistol cocked. “I remember you,” he said. “Are you ready to pay back the two shillings and sixpence you took from me on the Nottinghamshire crossroad?”
“Is this the padder?” Frank struck in. “Put a bullet through him, Hugh.”
“Don’t ’ee shoot me, master,” the other begged. “I did not kill ’ee then, and I might ha’.”