“Robbers!” cried the colonel, now furious. “How dare you apply such epithet to me—an officer of the King?”
“I dare to the King’s self—if he stood there beside you.”
“A curse upon you, caitiff! You shall rue your rash words. Know, sir, that I have the power to punish sedition as recusancy. But I won’t palter speech with you any longer. Do you still refuse to lend the money—pay it, I should rather say?”
“Oh! you needn’t have taken the trouble to correct yourself. It’s a demand all the same. The ‘stand and deliver’ of a highwayman. But you shall have an answer. I still refuse it.”
“Then it shall be taken from you, sirrah?”
“If so, sirrah, ’twill be under protest.”
“Under protest be it. As you like about that; devil care I. Ha-ha-ha!” and Lunsford laughed again. Then turning to the troop, he called out to his first sergeant,—
“Dismount, Robins, and follow me with a couple of files?”
Saying which, he flung himself out of the saddle, and made to ascend the steps of the porch.
“You don’t enter my house by an open door,” cried the Master of Hollymead, stepping backward. “You’ll have to break it in first,” he added, gliding into the hallway, dashing the door to behind him, and double-bolting it inside.