“No thanks to him that he hasn’t, the madman!” Ridydale answered. “He would fight in his shirt, for he swore these fellows were too paltry for a gentleman to guard against. So he laid off his armor ere he rode into the fight. Now that, sir, is the temper the gentlemen of your house have ever been of, and ’tis the only fitting temper.”
It looked like the beginning of their usual disagreement, so Hugh kept silent, the more willingly since he found himself tired so that even talking required exertion. He leaned rather heavily against Ridydale, and watched the field, that looked gray in the deepening twilight, slip by them, and, when he shut his eyes, still saw the field with the trampled bodies of men and writhing chargers. Then, of a sudden, their horse pulled up. “I take it we’ll rendezvous here,” he heard the corporal say. “Perchance you’ll bide with us till the colonel comes, sir?”
“No,” Hugh said hurriedly, slipping down from the horse. “Thank you, Ridydale. We’d have been in a bad way but for you.”
Then he stumbled away with Frank across the hummocky plain, which darkness made all the more treacherous, and, scrambling up the hill to the broad summit, toiled about among the scattered troops that were straggling back. “I am clean spent”[spent”] his companion said sorrowfully. “I would not be a foot soldier for all the gold in the kingdom. Where think you my father is, Hugh?”
“We’ll try to find him,” Hugh answered, with what cheerfulness he could summon, and turned aside to ask a friendly-looking soldier if he knew where Sir William Pleydall’s troop was stationed. The man did not know, and, indeed, in the confusion and darkness no one seemed to know anything; so the two boys could only tramp up and down, Frank expostulating crossly and Hugh too utterly weary to respond, till at last they got sight of a figure that looked familiar in the dusk. Running thither they found it was Major Bludsworth, whereupon Frank nearly hugged him. “I never was so glad to see you before, sir,” he cried. “Where is my father, and when are we going to have anything to eat?”
Bludsworth took Frank by the arm, and half carried him a rod or so to a small fire beneath a bank about which Sir William and a little knot of his officers were standing. “Here’s a runaway in quest of you, Sir William,” he announced brusquely.
“Francis, you here?” Sir William asked, with some displeasure.
“Prithee, do not be angry, sir,” Frank protested, “I’ve had a gallant day of it. And I have not had the least hurt. And Hugh here killed a man, sir. And has Dick Strangwayes brought back my Jade?”
“The beast is unscathed,” answered Sir William, drawing Frank to him with a hand on his shoulder. “And another time you may as well ride in on her back at the start and done with.”
“Master Strangwayes has come out safe, then?” Hugh’s eagerness made him strike in.