She followed me down the hedge-side. I turned once or twice to look at her, carefully pretending that it was only to see how she was getting on. The last time I thus stole another memory of her splendid presence we were only a few paces from the gate, and when my reluctant eyes turned again to their rightful work, they looked straight into a pair of fishy eyes set in a face as blank and ugly as a bladder of lard.
Face and eyes belonged to a big, sleek, sly man, perched on the top bar of the gate. He had a notebook in his hand in which he had been entering some jottings. He suspended his writing to examine us, picking his nasty, yellow teeth meanwhile with the point of his pencil. His horse was hitched to the post on the Stoneward side of the gate, where the stile was. He was well enough dressed, and, as far as I could see, unarmed.
It was a most exasperating thing to have pitched into him, whoever and whatever he was, and indeed I much disliked the look of him, and would gladly have knocked him on the head. True, travellers were not rare on this road, since it was part of the great highway from London to Chester, and the little thoroughfare town of Stone, some three miles ahead, had a noted posthouse. However, I kept, or tried to keep, my feelings out of my face and voice, and accosted him cheerily.
"Good day, friend! What may be the price of fat beeves in Stafford market to-day?"
"Dearer than men's heads will be at the town gates after the next assizes," he replied, stroking his notebook and grinning evilly.
"You'll never light on a Scotsman, dead or alive, that's worth as much as a Staffordshire heifer," said I, leading the way past him to the stile, over which I handed Mistress Margaret into the road.
"They won't all be Scotsmen, my friend," he replied, still stroking his notebook.
"No?" said I, eager at heart to knock him off his perch.
"Nor men," he added, leering at Margaret.
"Come along, Sal," said I to her laughingly, "before the good gentleman jots you down a Jacobite."