As I left him, foully imprecating, I threw a laughing word at him. "Messiter," says I, "lies on the left, and Bollingham to the right. Turn round three times, my cock, and choose which you will," whereat I rode laughing into the darkness, yet ere I did so I saw him savagely wheel into the Messiter Road, cutting viciously at his horse.
As for me, I rode on, singing cheerfully enough, for the encounter had warmed my blood, and I no longer felt the cold so greatly. But I had not got farther than a mile from the cross-roads when I was aware in the pause of my singing of a sound near by, of a voice that called on the unquiet air, very faint and melancholy. I reined in, and listened, and presently the cry came to me again from the right; and so, jumping off the mare, I left her in the road, standing obedient as she was used to do, and walked gingerly in that direction. I did not trust myself in that profound darkness and the treacherous snow, and, sure enough, I was right to be careful, for in a little I was plunged up to my waist in a hollow.
"Where are you?" I called aloud, and the voice, so clearly now a woman's, came back.
I made my way to it with difficulty, and soon solved the riddle; here was a chaise wandered out of the road and buried in a deep drift, and by the body of the carriage a poor lady in the direst state of distress and terror.
"Why, madam," said I, "are ye alone?"
At which she broke out that her husband was gone for help, as was the postilion, but in different directions, and that they had took the horses, and that she, poor delicate creature, was thus solitary on a naked and solitary moor, with never even a wild-fowl to scream with her for company.
"Oh," says I, "we will soon mend that, madam, or call me catchpole," and I took hold of her. "Ye're in a drift, mistress," I said. "I'll give ye company, if ye will have it, until your husband shall return"—and then all of a sudden it flashed upon me that her husband was he who had abused me so grossly, and whom I had rumpadded.
"Phew!" says I to myself, "why, here's a pretty comedy." But the lady was all that occupied my thoughts just then, and so I conducted her to the road, and encouraged her into talk as I did so, for she was in a terrible fluster, what with the loneliness and the cold and the darkness.
"Now," says I, "what you need, madam, is a posset of hot brandy and a warm and virtuous couch," I says, "and with the help of my good nag here 'tis what you'll have."
"Oh, sir, you are very good," says she, tremulously. "You are good beyond Christian seeming."