Passengers inside huddled together, stamping benumbed feet and wishing for the journey's end. Passengers outside poured anathemas against the weather and the slowness of the horses into the depths of fur-lined coats, wherein their faces were buried.
Only two or three of the younger men perched near the driver were able to crack occasional jokes, whilst one alone strove huskily to troll a stanza of some popular ditty.
Insulting! Positively insulting to sing of drinking and being jolly, or drowning melancholy either, in face of such a gale, and the coach an hour behind time! Even his comrades upbraided him, whilst one beetroot-nosed individual near looked positively murderous.
But Michael Berrington was made that way, and—so an Oxford wag declared—would have found food for laughter with a noose around his neck.
"Hi, there! Hi! hi. For Heaven's sake, my masters! Hey——"
Michael leant over the side of the coach and called aloud to the driver to pull up.
A man, in holland smock, and face as white as chalk, had burst through the hedge on their left and was running frantically after them.
"Hey, hi, for Heaven's——"
He was breathless before he reached them, and the anathemas of the beetroot-nosed passenger rose high above his fur collar.
But Michael—nimble now as when, ten years before, he had scaled a high garden wall with a child's ball—had swung himself down on to the ground beside the man.