“So it’s you, Long Murgatroyd,” he said.
“Aye, it’s me.”
“Be damned to you, why did you hide in a muddy ditch if you wanted another fight?”
Murgatroyd, white-faced and spent, glanced at the rope swinging gently across the road, and the Master saw it for the first time.
“You’ve come as low as that?” The Master was shaken by passionate loathing. “As low as that, Murgatroyd?”
“Well, your blamed luck won’t last for ever. Any but you would have been pitched on his head when his horse got into the rope—and I’d have finished you, need being. So now your going to finish me instead.”
Hardcastle’s riding-whip was lifted to cut the man across the face; but Murgatroyd was laughing at him in the moonlight—a wan laugh enough, yet full of dogged will to endure whatever came.
“Nita sent you on the errand?” he asked sharply.
“She did, in a way. We know what her tongue is—me and you, we know it. She said you were my master any day if it came to a fight. So I stepped up to kill you.” Again he laughed. “I should have told her naught of the rope, you understand. There’d have been you ligging dead in the road, and happen she’d have given me a kiss or two for my pains. That’s how it was. And I’m here, and want to be rid o’ my life.”
Hardcastle could make nothing of it. Wrath died in him. The man was rough as a savage, simple beyond belief. He had come up to kill, and, failing, expected no mercy from his enemy.