"Take that!" cried the old woman, flinging her boot at the speaker's head.
It was the signal for the battle to begin. My friend the flute-player followed up the boot by hitting the spokesman of the law full in the face with his fist. Thereon blows fell thick and fast and furious on every side. The Sheriff's men closed up, nor did the gypsies budge an inch. Without a weapon of any sort, as I was, I had to bear my part perforce, since there was no opportunity to explain that I was neither a gypsy nor a stealer of sheep. But even had it offered, I could never have embraced it. Just as a man may be known by the company he keeps, he is at the same time laid under the obligation to defend his friends.
My first care, of course, was for Cynthia. As the Sheriff's men were not likely to molest her should she run away out of reach of harm, I insisted on her doing so. I had to be firm with her too, since she was by no means disposed to separate from me in this pass. She would either have me come with her or she would stay where she was. The first alternative was impracticable even had I wished to embrace it. The enemy were all about us by now, and I should not have been permitted to go; and the second put her personal safety into such a jeopardy that I had to be very stern. Thereon she unwillingly complied.
No sooner had she gone than I slipped the flute in my pocket and prepared to take a hand in the defence. As I had no other weapons I had to employ my hands. Had the conditions been equal I could have wished no better. But they were little likely to prevail against superior numbers, armed with staves. Indeed, from the first, submission would have been the wiser course for us all, as the gypsies were at such a disadvantage that they had no chance. Yet blows were dealt with mighty goodwill on both sides; sometimes the upholders of the law went down, but more often the breakers of it. Presently two fellows with cudgels in their hands made to seize me by the collar, whereon I dealt the most assiduous of the twain so shrewd a crack on the point of the jawbone as laid him low. The other fellow came at me furiously with his stave, and I had barely time to whisk my head aside and so get it clear of the blow that was aimed at it. I was hastening to follow up this delicate attention with a few of my own, when a third adversary unseen came behind me, and gave me such a tap at the side of the head as brought me to the ground bleeding and half insensible.
Before I could make any attempt to gather myself again, a pair of knees were in the middle of my chest, and a strong hand half choked the life out of my throat. I was in no condition to kick or struggle much; but whatever the philosophy of my temper in the piping times of peace, devil a bit did I exercise of it now. Bleeding and breathless as I was, I resisted with what was in the circumstances an absurd tenacity; and it was some little time, after a great display of energy on both sides that two or three of my enemies ultimately secured me, bound my hands and raised me to my feet. And I hope the reader will observe that I again insist that it took two or three persons to conclude this unfortunate business, as it did to inaugurate it. I know not what vain glory it is in a man that makes him so punctilious in matters of this sort.
By the time I had been overcome and raised on to my feet in fetters, the affair was almost decided. There could be but one ending; and very soon the unfortunate gypsies were all of them captive too, with cords round their wrists, and most of them bloody of bearing. No time was lost in marching us away to the nearest magistrate. There seemed about a score of armed men to take the custody of us. In the haste with which everything was carried out, in the uncertain moonlight, and in the dull vague condition of mind that the shock of events, to name only one cause, had induced, I had not the smallest opportunity of taking farewell of Cynthia. Nor had she any means of approaching me, seeing how sedulously we were guarded, and how promptly we were marched away.
The whole thing was begun and ended so swiftly that this very grandiloquent and self-important quill-pen hath made, I find, an incomparably greater business of it than ever it was in itself. It can never bring its dignity down to the subordinate office of the relation of a plain piece of history, but is all for the frills and the trimmings. Do not be deceived into thinking, therefore, that this country brawl was as great as the battle of Marathon. But at least, at the time the consequences were to me very poignant. As we were dragged along over the stubble and through the moonlight, we knew not whither, I was more stunned by my evil fortune than by the blow I had come by in the argument, notwithstanding that as I walked the blood trickled in a thin warm stream on to my coat. For a person in my circumstances to fall into the hands of the law in a hedge scuffle in an alien quarrel, was about as scurvy an accident as could possibly happen. I was truly between the devil and the deep sea. To clear myself of the charge of being a gypsy and a sheep-stealer, I should be compelled to expose my identity, and in doing so should but fall out of the frying-pan into the fire.
There was another side to the matter, equally black. Whatever would happen to Cynthia? Was she not left utterly destitute, without a friend, in a foreign country? Even in the extreme unlikelihood of my regaining my freedom, neither of us would know where to seek the other, and thus at a time when it was so imperative that we should be together, we should be wrenched apart. Look at the case as I might, I could derive no crumb of comfort from it.
It was in a great depression of spirit then that I was haled, weak, bleeding, and encumbered along the country lanes to meet my fate. What it was likely to be I did not exactly know, but look at the matter how I would, there seemed to be but one natural ending to it. I was parted from my poor little wife, doubtless for ever; and if I did not come to the gallows for murder or stealing sheep, I must perforce end my days in a debtor's prison.