The fellow's face was so white and his lips and his bruises were so blue that Phil laughed at him before his eyes, who thereupon lost his temper and snarled, "It's all well enough to take things lightly, you who got no beating; but hanging is no laughing matter."
He then looked cautiously around and ran back the way they had come. When he returned he held between thumb and forefinger the silver coin Phil had thrown back at the burly knight. Martin bought food with it and Phil, though he thought it would have choked him, helped him eat it; and so they survived the day.
"That keeper, Barwick," Martin said that evening as the two tramped west along the highway, "is my brother, and an ungrateful wretch he is."
"I knew he was your brother," Phil said. But he was not thinking of Martin or his brother. He was thinking of the old knight in the scarlet cloak so bravely decked with silver lace. There was only one man Philip Marsham had ever known, who had such a rough, just, heavy-handed humour as Sir John Bristol or any such indomitable sense of fair play, and that man was Phil's dead father.
[CHAPTER VI]
THE ROSE OF DEVON
They came to Bristol over the hills that lie to the south of the town. They had lost time on the way and had grown weary and sore of foot; and finding at last that there was little hope of overtaking at Bideford the thin man with whom they had parted on the road, they had turned north in Somerset at the end of Polton Hill. They passed first across a lonely waste where for miles the only human being they saw was an aged man gathering faggots; then over the Mendip Hills and through rough valleys and rougher uplands, and so at last to the height whence Bristol and Avon Valley and Bristol Channel in the east lie spread in a vast panorama.
Far away in Hungroad and Kingroad ships were anchored, but the vessels at the wharves of Bristol lay with their keels in mud, for the tide was out and the tides of Bristol, as all know, have a wonderful great flow and ebb.
The two went on into the town, where there were seafaring men standing about and talking of ships, which gave Phil Marsham a feeling of being once more at home after his inland travels; and passing this one tavern and another, they came to a square where there was a whipping-post and a stocks, and a man in the stocks.
Now a man in stocks was a pleasing sight to Phil, for he was not so old that he missed the humour of it, and he paused to grin at the unlucky wight who bore with ill grace the jeers of the urchins that had assembled to do him honour; but when Martin saw the fellow he looked a second time and turned very hastily round. Straightway seizing Phil by the arm he whispered hoarsely, "Come now, we must hie us away again, and that speedily."