"In my head, sir," said Kit, with a careless nod. "Safe behind wooden walls, as my father put it when he bade me learn it all by rote."
"No jesting," snapped Drinkwater, nettled by a guarded laugh from one of his own men. "The bargain was that you told us the message."
"That I told you where it lay—no more, no less. I have told you, and paid for that good ale of yours."
Drinkwater was no fool. He saw himself outwitted and wasted no regrets. After all, he had the better of the jest.
"Tie him by the legs and arms," he said dourly, "and set him on the bench here till we're ready to start. There are more ways than one of sobering a King's man."
Christopher did not like the feel of the rope about his limbs, nor did he relish the attentions of stray village-folk who came and jeered at him after his captors had gone in to supper. One can despise louts, but still feel the wasp-sting of their gibes.
Into the middle of it all came two horsewomen; and to Kit, seeing the well-known horses, it was as if a breath of Yoredale and the spring came to him. He knew the old men, too, who guarded the horse-women, front and rear. Under his gladness went an uneasy feeling that yesterday's hard riding and hard lighting, or Drinkwater's ale, or both, had rendered him light-headed. It was not possible that she could be here in Ripley.
Joan Grant was tired of the uneventful journey, tired of her maid Pansy, whose tongue ran like a brook. "This should be Ripley, at long-last," she said fretfully. "Tell me, girl, am I grey-headed yet? It seems a lifetime since the morning."
Pansy, looking through the right-hand window of the coach, saw a tavern-front, its windows soft with candle-light. On the bench in front of it, lit by the ruddy gloaming, was a man bound with ropes, a man who threw gibe for gibe at a company of Ripley's cowards who baited him.
"He carries no knight's air just now," said Pansy, with a bubble of laughter; "but it was not for naught I found that stirrup-iron at the gate this morning."