“We’ll stop them at the old thorns, half-way up Borrodaile Rise. The coach will back off the road, and likely enough upset in the soft moor. I’ll cover Sir George, and pull the moment he’s off his seat to get down. The others will rob the passengers, and—and I suppose there is nothing more to arrange?”
The Abbé, folding up his papers to leave the room, nodded carelessly and replied:—
“We mount in half an hour. Through the heart, I think, Bold. The head is easily missed at a dozen paces from the saddle.”
“Through the heart,” answered the captain, but Malletort had already quitted the room and closed the door.
“Half an hour,” mused Bold, now left to himself in the cold and dimly-lighted apartment. “In half an hour a good deal may be done both in love and war. And Alice promised to be here by now. I thought the gentleman never would go away. What a time they were, to be sure! We make quicker work of it in our trade. How cold it is! I wish I’d a glass of brandy; but I dursn’t, no, I dursn’t, though I’m all of a shake like. I’ll have one ‘steadier’ just before I get on the mare. If I’m over-primed I shall miss him, and he’s not the sort to give a chap a second chance. I wish this job was over. I never half-liked it from the first. Hush! I think that’s Alice’s cough. Poor little girl! She loves the very boots I wear. I wish she’d come, though. This room is cursed lonesome, and I don’t like my own company unless I can have it really to myself. I always fancy there’s somebody else I can’t see. How my teeth chatter. It’s the cold. It must be the cold! Well, there’s no harm in lighting the fire, at any rate.”
So speaking, or rather muttering, the captain, on whose nerves repeated glasses of brandy at all hours of the day and night had not failed to make an impression, proceeded to collect with trembling hands certain covers of despatches and other coarse scraps of paper left on the floor and table, which litter he placed carefully on the hearth, building the damp sticks over them skilfully enough, and applying his solitary candle to the whole.
His paper flared brightly, but with no other effect than to produce thick, stifling clouds of smoke from the saturated fuel and divers oaths spoken out loud from the disgusted captain.
“May the devil fly away with them!” said he, in a towering rage, “to a place where they’ll burn fast enough without lighting. And me, too!” he added yet more wrathfully, “for wasting my time like a fool waiting for a jilt who can’t even lay a fire properly in an inn chimney.”
The words had scarce left his lips when a discordant roar resounded, as it seemed, from the very wall of the house, and a hideous monster, that he never doubted was the Arch Fiend whom he had invoked, came sprawling on all-fours down the chimney which the smoke had refused to ascend, and made straight for the terrified occupant of the apartment, whose hair stood on end, and whose whole senses were for a moment paralysed with horror and dismay.
In a single glance the captain beheld the black shaggy hide, the wide-spreading horns, the cloven hoofs, the long and tufted tail! That glance turned him for one instant to a man of stone. The next, with an irrepressible shout that denoted the very anguish of fear, he sprang through the door, upsetting and extinguishing the candle in his flight, and hurried downstairs, closely, though silently followed by the monster, who thus escaped from the room before Malletort, alarmed at the disturbance, could re-enter it with a light.