“Almost a bull’s-eye, Will,” shouted two or three, encouragingly, and the youngster smiled as he stepped back.
Robin now took the archer’s place. Drawing his arrow to its head, he seemed to let it go carelessly. For an instant it looked as though it had missed the target entirely. Ruth and Rose felt their hearts sink, for they wanted bold Robin to win. But Maid Marian was laughing.
“He has split the other,” she cried. And “It’s a tie, it’s a tie,” came calls from the onlookers here and there.
All this while the three girls had been slowly drawing nearer and nearer to the end of the course where Robin and his men stood. As he stepped back, smiling, he caught sight of them, and instantly walked over.
“Greeting, sweet maid,” he said to Marian. She answered him smiling and blushing, and turning to Rose and Ruth, “These be friends of mine,” she said, “and of thine too, Sir.”
He bowed gallantly. “Come ye to the greenwood when this is over, and we will have a little feast of celebration; for I fear the sheriff’s red-headed boy will not carry off that bow. It has taken my eye, Marian.”
Marian whispered something, on the pretence of bending down to fasten her shoe-lace. To Rose it sounded as though she had said:
“The sheriff means to keep it ... a messenger went this morning to Nottingham ... you know what that may mean.”
Robin looked startled for a second. But another cheer from the crowd made him turn to the target. The sheriff’s son had shot again, and there stuck his arrow, not two inches from the centre of the bull’s-eye.
“Come on, Robin,” yelled several, “beat that an you can.”