“No!” said Sir Jasper sharply. “I’ll have no man condemned without a hearing. He lives wide of here—perhaps this last news of the Rising has not reached him. Any man may be called away on sudden business.”
“You’re generous, sir. I’m hot for the King, and no other business in the world would tempt me out of Lancashire just now. Besides, he must have known.”
Nance had lost her high spirits; but she was glad that some one had spoken on Will Underwood’s behalf, for otherwise she must have yielded to the impulse to defend him.
“That does not follow, sir,” said Sir Jasper, punctilious in defence of a man he neither liked nor trusted. “At any rate, it is no time for accusation. Mr. Underwood, if I know him, will join us farther south.”
Young Hunter, a wayward, unlicked cub, would not keep silence. “Yes,” he said, in his thin, high-pitched voice, “he’ll join us as far south as London—after he’s sure that a Stuart’s on the throne again.”
An uneasy silence followed. Older men looked at older men, knowing that they shared this boy’s easy summing-up of Underwood’s motives. And Nance wondered that this man, whom she was near to loving, had no friends here—no friends of the loyal sort who came out into the open and pledged their faith in him.
There was a game hound of the pack—a grey old hound that, like the huntsman, was a keener fox-hunter than loyalist; and, through all this uproar and confusion, through the dismayed silence that followed, he had been nosing up and down the pastures, finding a weak scent here, a false trail there. And now, on the sudden, he lifted his grey head, and his note was like a bugle-call. The younger hounds scampered out from among the hoofs that had been playing dangerously near them and gave full tongue as they swung down the pastures.
Sir Jasper spurred forward. “Here’s an omen, friends,” he cried. “The hunt is up in earnest. We shall kill, I tell you! we shall kill!”
It was a run that afterwards, when the fires of war died down and all Lancashire was hunting once again in peace, was talked of beside cottage hearths, on market-days when squires and yeomen met for barter—was talked of wherever keen, lusty men foregathered for the day’s business and for gossip of the gallant yesterdays.
Sir Jasper led, with Squire Demaine close at his heels. It seemed, indeed, the day of older folk; for away in front of them, where the sterns of eager hounds waved like a frantic sea, it was Pincher—grey, hefty, wise in long experience—that kept the running.