The Yeoman Adventurer

by George W. Gough

"No idea," said I.

"Blast ye. I wish y'had," he growled viciously, and I turned away to smile.

We passed through a village littered with the Duke's baggage wagons and pretty full of soldiery. This chilled my spirit somewhat, for it looked as if we were about to run into the rear of the Royal army. Outside the village, however, we again had the road to ourselves, and a mile farther on dropped to a walk to climb a long slant of road.

Whenever the road curved my way I had seen the corporal and his two men riding from fifty to a hundred yards ahead of us. Not very far up the slope we came on a farmstead lying flush on the roadside. In the yard were some thirty head of shaggy black cattle, of the northern kind seldom seen in our parts and therefore attractive to a farmer's eye. A farm-hand leaning over the gate had some noisy gossip with the dragoons as they passed, and bawled his news to a group of men sitting at meat under a hovel. It was a poor enough place to support so many men, for the farm-wife, who came to her kitchen door to see what the clatter was about, was of no better seeming than a yokel's wife with us. My eyes were on her curiously when the man on the gate skipped off and flung it open right across the muzzles of our horses.

In the tick of a clock the whole scene changed. The men under the hovel rushed out, fell on the cattle, thrashed them mercilessly with great battoons, yelled at them like maniacs, and drove them in a shoving, bellowing, maddened mass into the road, which here had a stone wall on the side opposite the farm. When the torrent was fairly going, two of the supposed yokels snatched up carbines, climbed on to the hovel, and opened fire on the dragoons in our rear.

The master hand of the Colonel was in this beyond a doubt. With a loud curse, the sergeant, who was on the side away from the farm, opened the door and was for leaping out. He bethought himself and half turned, one hand on the door and one foot on the step, to look an evil inquiry at me. That half-turn was his undoing. Part of the living, struggling torrent of cattle was shoved round our way and came sweeping by. One beast brushed the door open even as he glared at me and tumbled him outwards. As he twisted in his fall another drove her sharp horns clean into him, and shook and twirled him off again like a terrier playing with a rat. The rearguard turned tail and fled. The vanguard had simply been swept off the scene, and I saw them spurring up the slope with the cattle surging after them. The plan had been thought out to a nicety and had worked to perfection. I was free, free for Margaret. I sat down again dizzied and happy.

My rescuers took no notice of me but ran down the road in a body and stood round the sergeant. After some excited talk they carried him back, called on me to aid, and rammed him into the coach, where he lay huddled on the seat in front of me. Without so much as a word to me, the commander pulled our driver off the box, ordered a man up in his place, climbed after him, and said briefly, "Go like the devil!"

The carriage turned up a rough lane which ran eastward out of the high road opposite the farm, leaving most of my rescuers standing uncertain in a group. The driver cut his horses savagely with his whip, and we went at a hard gallop. The jolting tumbled me about in the coach, and I had hard work, shackled as I was, to keep the sergeant on the seat. He was still alive, though so hideously injured that death could only be a question of minutes. Where we were going and why they were carrying him along with us, were questions it was useless to bother about. Margaret would explain everything when we met. I could make little of the men who had rescued me. They were clearly not farm-hands, for they were well armed, the guns I had seen looked to me to be military carbines, and they had carried through their business briskly and intelligently.

I heard the men on the box talking, but their speech was only about the road and the speed. The country got rougher and wilder; the distant hills were losing their clear-cut, rolling outlines, and becoming neighbours and obstacles. The horses were thrashed unmercifully, but at times even the well-plied whip could get no more than a crawl out of them.

The sergeant's end was at hand. He rallied, as men commonly do before they put foot in the black river, and looked at me unrecognizingly. He closed his eyes again, and began to writhe and mutter strange words. Suddenly he cried plainly, "Curse the swine! Another wedge, ye damned chicken-heart!" He looked at me again, and this time made out who I was, and cursed loathsomely in his disappointment.