"By cock and pie!" grumbled Ormiston, under his barred aventayle, as he breathed his horse a little; "'twas a rash deed and a perilous, to come on this hellicate errand alone, like two knights of the Round Table, when we might so easily have had a hundred good lances at our cruppers."
"Heed it not, good Ormiston!" laughed the Earl, who was in excellent humour with himself and every thing else; for Mary had received him so affably, and thanked his good service so graciously. "Heed it not, I pray thee! If thou reachest the gate of Hermitage with a whole skin, thou canst stuff it well with wine and baked beef; but if thou gettest a Lockerby lick between this and its gates—why"——
"Thou must pay the masses for my soul, as I have not had a plack in my pouch since Michaelmas, and I doubt mickle if Mass John of the Priesthaugh will credit me."
"'Tis said that John of Park wears a corselet of Milan inlaid with gold, and worth a hundred angels. 'Twould be a rare prize for thee, did we meet him here by the Birkwoodshaws."
"By the mass! I hope not; for I have no wish to lose that which will not make the laird of Park one jot the richer—my poor life—which he will have lances enow to send to the devil in a twinkling!"
"If we are to be intercepted," rejoined the Earl, "by broken knaves, I wish they would show face while our horses are fresh, and we could run a course on the level sward here with some pith and spirit."
A pause ensued, during which nothing was heard but the dull tramp of the steeds on the grassy waste, its echo from the mountains, the hard breathing of the riders, half suppressed in the hollow of their helmets, and the clinking of their mail. Suddenly the Earl drew up; for an abrupt turn of the path traversing that beautiful valley, which is ten miles in length, brought them close to a band of some twenty moss-troopers, riding leisurely down the hill side in full harness, with their steel caps and lofty lances glinting above the hazel bushes that tufted the mountains. They were trotting in a circle, and goading on a herd of fifty or sixty fat oxen, which they had harried from the holme of Canonbie Priory, which had been ruined and destroyed by the English, on their retreat from Solway Moss, twenty-four years before.
"Cock and pie!" exclaimed Ormiston.
"Devil take thine oath of cock and pie!" exclaimed the Earl, testily. "It cometh in on all occasions—grave as well as gay. Seest thou not that yonder is a band of Liddesdale lances, and we have now a chance of being overborne, slam, and thrown into the Hermitage, with a stone at our necks, to make amends for our late hard justice at Jedburgh."
"The knaves will scarcely dare to slay thee, who art the queen's lieutenant, and warden of the three marshes; but I doubt mickle if their scruples will extend to Hob Ormiston."