He started from his chair as Johnnie did likewise, for even as the man spoke a most horrid and untoward noise filled all the air.
Both men rushed to the bulging window of leaded glass, which looked out into the High Street.
There was a huge shouting, a frightful stamp and clatter as of feet and horses' hooves upon the stones, but above all there came a shrill, snarling, neighing noise, ululating with a ferocity that was not human, a vibration of rage, which was like nothing Commendone had ever heard before.
"Jesus! But what is this?" Johnnie cried, flinging open the casement, his face suddenly white with fear—so utterly outside all experience was the dreadful screeching, which now seemed a thousand times louder.
He peered out into the street and saw people rushing to the doors and windows of all the houses opposite, with faces as white and startled as his own. He looked to the right, for it was from there the pealing horror of sound was coming, but he could see nothing, because less than twenty yards away the High Street made a sudden turn at right angles towards the Market Place.
"It is some devil, certes," the landlord panted. "Apollyon must have just such a voice. What——"
The words died away upon his lips, and in a moment the two men and all the other watchers in the street knew what had happened.
With a furious stamping of hooves, round the corner of an old timbered house, leaping from the ground in ungovernable fury, and in that leaping advancing but very slowly, came a huge stallion, black as a coal, its eyes red with malice, its ears laid back over its head, the huge bull-like neck erect, and smeared with foam and blood.
Commendone had never seen such a monster; indeed, there were but few of them in England at that time—the product of Lanarkshire mares crossed with the fierce Flanders stallions, only just then introduced into England by that Earl of Arran who had been a suitor for the hand of the Princess Elizabeth.
The thing seemed hardly horse, but malignant demon rather, and with a cold chill at their hearts the landlord and his guest saw that the stallion gripped a man by one arm and shoulder, a man that was no more a man, but a limp bundle of clothes, and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat.