Volume Three—Chapter Seven.
About an hour after the recapture of Henry Holtspur, two men might have been seen descending the long slope of Red Hill, in the direction of Uxbridge.
They were both men of large stature—one of them almost gigantic. They were on horseback: the younger of the two bestriding a good steed, while his older and more colossal companion was mounted upon as sorry a jade as ever set hoof upon a road.
The first, booted and spurred, with a plumed hat upon his head, and gauntlets upon his wrists, in the obscure light might have been mistaken for a cavalier. When the moon made its appearance from behind the clouds—which happened at intervals—a certain bizarrerie about his costume forbade the supposition; and the stalwart form and swarth visage of Gregory Garth were then too conspicuous to escape recognition, by any acquaintance he might have encountered upon the road.
The more rustic garb of his travelling companion—as well as the figure it enveloped—could with equal facility be identified as belonging to Dick Dancey, the deer-stealer.
The presence of these two worthies on horseback, and riding towards Uxbridge, was not without a purpose, presently to be explained.
The cuirassiers had been astray in conjecturing that the noises heard in Wapsey’s Wood proceeded from a gang of gipsies. It was nothing of the kind. What they heard was simply Gregory Garth engaged in the performance of that promise he had made in the morning. Although he did not carry out his threat to the exact letter, he executed it in the spirit; taking his departure from the bedside of Will Walford, only after every bone in the woodman’s body had been made to taste the quality of the cudgel expressly cut for the occasion.
It is possible that Will Walford’s punishment might have been still more severe, but that his castigator was pressed for time—so much so, that he left the wretch without releasing him, with a set of suffering bones, and a skin that exhibited all the colours of the rainbow.
After thus settling accounts with the “tree-tur,” as he called him, Garth had thrown away his holly stick, and hastened back to the road.