“A prisoner! Who?”
A name was pronounced, or rather soubriquet: for it was by a phrase that the question was answered.
“The Black Horseman,” replied the man who had been questioned. “That’s the prisoner you shall see, master.”
The announcement might have caused a greater commotion among the spectators, but that most of those present had already learnt the object of the assemblage. The excitement that at that instant succeeded, sprang from a different cause. A man who had climbed up on the parapet of the bridge—and who had been standing with his face turned westward—was seen making a signal, which appeared to be understood by most of those around the inn. At the same instant, a crowd of boys, who had been sharing his view from the top of the wall, commenced waving their caps, and crying out “The horse sogers—the King’s Kewresseers!—they’re comin’ they’re comin’!”
The shouting was succeeded by a profound silence—the silence of expectation.
Soon after, plumes waving over steel helmets, then the helmets themselves, then glancing gorgets and breastplates, proclaimed the approach of a troop of cuirassiers.
They came filing between the walls of grey mason-work—their helmets, as they rose up one after another over the arched parapet, blazing under the bright sun, and dazzling the eyes of the spectators.
In the troop there were exactly a dozen horsemen, riding in files of two each; but the cavalcade counted fourteen—its leader making the thirteenth, while a man, not clad in armour, though in line among the rest, completed the number.
This last individual, although robed in rich velvet, and with all the cast of a cavalier, was attached to the troop in a peculiar manner. The attitude he held upon his horse—with hands bound behind his back, and ankles strapped to the girth of his saddle—told that he was of less authority than the humblest private in the rank. He was a prisoner.
He was not unknown to the people composing that crowd, into the midst of which his escort was advancing. The black horseman had ridden too often through the streets of Uxbridge, and held converse with its inhabitants, to pass them in such fashion, without eliciting glances of recognition and gestures of sympathy.