"A hearty fellow, and a stalwart one," the man who had spoken to him said. "I should not care to have a crack over the crown, with that staff of his. You met him coming down from the north, comrade?"
"Yes, some twenty miles away. It was near Moffat that I overtook him. I would rather drink with him than fight with him. Seldom have I seen a stronger-looking man."
"I am of your opinion, comrade; and some of these monks are not bad fighters, either. There have been bishops who have led the monks to battle, before now, and they proved themselves stout men-at-arms."
After the others had gone out, Oswald strolled through the village, and then mounted an eminence whence he could take a view across the valley, and of some of the hilltops to the northeast. On one of these, two miles away, he could make out a man standing by a horse. He watched him for some little time, but beyond taking a few steps backwards and forwards, the man did not move.
"He is a lookout," he said to himself, "and is no doubt watching some road from Kelso and Jedburgh. Baird will hardly think that the Armstrongs can have so soon gathered a force sufficient to attack him, but he may have thought it as well to place one of his men on the watch.
"I wonder how Roger is getting on! I think they must have taken him in, or he would have been back before this."
Roger had walked quietly up the hill on which the Bairds' hold was perched. A man stepped forward from the gate, as he neared it.
"None enter here," he said, "without permission from the master."
"Will you tell him that a poor monk, of the order of Saint Benedict, on his way from his convent at Dunbar to one near Carlisle, of which his brother is prior, prays hospitality for a day or two, seeing that he is worn out by long travel?"
The sentry spoke to a man behind him, and the latter took the message to William Baird. The latter was in a good humour. He himself had not taken part in the raid on the Armstrongs, which had been led by Thomas Baird, a cousin; but the fact that the latter had been entirely successful, and had burned down Armstrong's house, and brought back his daughters, had given him the greatest satisfaction. There was a long-standing feud between the two families, and the fact that the Armstrongs were on good terms with their English neighbours, and still more that one of them had married the sister-in-law of a Forster of Yardhope, had greatly embittered the feeling, on his side. He had long meditated striking a blow at them, and the present time had been exceptionally favourable.