A mile south from Langton, as Giles, the bailiff at Windyhough, was riding not far behind the gentry—having at heart the need to keep his master well in sight—a fiddle-headed horse came blundering down the road. The beast was creamed with foam, and he scattered the footmen right and left as he made forward. Only when he reached Giles’s side he halted, stood shivering with the recoil from his own wild gallop, and pushed his nose up against the bailiff’s bridle-hand. And Giles, with scant respect for the mare that had carried him so far, slipped from the saddle, and fussed about the truant as if he were a prodigal returned. Giles did not heed that he was holding up all the men behind, that the gentlemen in front had drawn rein, aware of some disturbance in the rear, and that the Prince himself was asking what the trouble was.
“Where hast thou been, old lad? I thought thee lost,” the bailiff was muttering, with all a countryman’s disregard of bigger issues when his heart was touched. And the horse could not tell him that, after throwing Rupert, he had lost sight of the master he pursued and had wasted time in seeking him down casual by-roads. “Ye’ve had an ill rider, by the look o’ thee. Ye threw him, likely? Well, serve him right—serve him varry right.”
Giles, with a slowness that suggested he had all the time in the world to spare, got to the back of the fiddle-headed chestnut, and felt at home again.
“What mun I do wi’ this lile nag?” he asked dispassionately, still holding the reins of Nance’s borrowed mare.
Sir Jasper, seeing that his bailiff was the cause of this unexpected check, could not keep back his laughter.
“What is the pleasantry?” asked the Prince. “Tell it to me. I think we need a jest or two, if we’re to get safely over these evil roads of yours.”
“Oh, it is naught, your Highness—naught at all, unless you know Giles as I do. He thinks more of that fiddle-headed horse of his than of the pick amongst our Lancashire hunters—and he’s holding up our whole advance.”
“What mun I do wi’ the mare?” repeated Giles, looking round him with a large impassiveness. “I can’t take a led mare to Lunnon and do my share o’ fighting by the way. It stands to reason I mun have one hand free.”
The Prince, whose instinct for the humour of the road had put heart into his army since the forced march began, looked quietly for a moment at Giles’s face. Its simplicity, masking a courage hard as bog-oak, appealed to him. “By your leave, Sir Jasper,” he said, “my horse will scarcely last the day out—these roads have punished him. I shall be glad of the mare, if you will lend her to me.”
When the march was moving forward again, the Prince in the grey mare’s saddle, Lord Murray turned to an intimate who rode beside him. “His Highness forgets old saws,” he murmured, with the insolent assurance that attaches to the narrow-minded. “‘Never change horses when crossing a stream’—surely all prudent Scotsmen know the superstition.”