She withdrew muttering, and I fastened Black Prince as securely as I could against the wall. Suddenly the door was opened, and stooping low, with my heavy riding-whip grasped firmly in my right hand, I stepped inside.
At first I could see nothing, but just as I was cautiously feeling in my pockets for a match, the red flames of a wood fire, which was smouldering on the hearth, leaped up and showed me the bare walls and miserable interior of the tumble-down hovel, showed me, too, the figure of a tall, evil-looking man grasping a thick cudgel in his hand, and peering through the gloom at me with a sort of threatening inquisitiveness.
"What d'ye want wi' me?" the man began, suspiciously. Then suddenly he dropped his cudgel and staggered back against the frail wall, with his arms stretched out as though to keep me off.
"God, it's Muster Herbert! It's Muster Herbert's ghost. What d'ye want? What d'ye want? What d'ye want here wi' me? Speak, can't you!" he cried out in a tone of hysterical dread.
"Don't be a fool, John Hilton," I said, contemptuously. "I am Hugh Devereux, son of the man against whom you swore a lie twenty-five years ago, and I have come here to ask you a few questions."
He kept his eyes fixed upon me in a sort of sullen fascinated stare.
"First tell me why you swore that lie? It was Rupert Devereux who made you."
The man's brute courage was returning to him slowly. He picked up his cudgel and began to beat the side of his legs with it.
"You know how to command, young sir," he said, sneeringly. "Suppose I say I won't answer your d—d questions?"
"I don't think you'll be so foolish," I said. "If you don't want to find yourself in gaol for poaching, before the week's out, you'll do exactly as I tell you."