“Do not tell your friends to-night; they sleep too near to their wives’ ears. Go and find them to-morrow. Come, now, listen to everything closely and remember well.”
“We shall remember,” said Joos. And raising his goblet: “I drink to Spelle’s halter.”
“To the halter,” said Ulenspiegel. Then he went back with the baes into the tavern chamber where there sate drinking certain old clothes merchants of Ghent who were coming back from the Saturday market at Bruges, where they had sold for high prices doublets and short mantles of cloth of gold and silver bought for a few sous from ruined nobles who desired by their luxury and splendour to imitate the Spaniards.
And they kept revels and feasting because of their big profits.
Ulenspiegel and Joos Lansaem, sitting in a corner, as they drank, and without being heard, agreed that Joos should go to the curé of the church, a good pastor, incensed against Spelle, the murderer of innocent men. After that he would go to his friends.
On the morrow, Joos Lansaem and Michielkin’s friends, having been forewarned, left the Blauwe Gans, where they had their pints as usual, and so as to conceal their plans went off at curfew by different ways, and came to the Everghem causeway. They were seventeen in number.
At ten o’clock Spelle left the Falcon, followed by his two catchpolls and Pieter de Roose. Lansaem and his troop were hidden in the barn belonging to Samson Boene, a friend of Michielkin. The door of the barn was open. Spelle never saw them.
They heard him pass by, staggering with drink like Pieter de Roose and his two catchpolls also, and saying, in a thick voice and with many hiccups:
“Provosts! provosts! life is good to them in this world; hold me up, gallows birds that live on my leavings!”
Suddenly were heard upon the road, from the direction of the open country, the braying of an ass and the crack of a whip.