"Oh! I'll find some place or other in the tap-room outside."
"It's a way great folks have, I suppose," murmured Dame Kardos, shrugging her shoulders, "but I never saw or heard the likes of it before."
"But, my lord," lisped Clementina, greatly agitated, "won't those wild vagabonds outside disturb you?"
"Me?" exclaimed Hátszegi, "how the devil can they disturb me?"
"They are such wicked men, surely?"
"I don't care what sort of men they are." And with that he went out with the utmost sang froid; nay, as Clementina herself noticed, he drew forth his pocket pistols and left them behind him on the table.
"His lordship has no need to fear such men," the landlady reassured the ladies, "for he can talk to them in their own lingo."
Henrietta did not understand. Did robbers then speak a dialect peculiar to themselves? She became quite curious to hear how Hátszegi would speak to the robbers in their own language.
But the landlady knew exactly what to do. She filled a kulacs[11] for the baron and placed it on the table before him. Hátszegi took a good pull at it, dried the mouth of the kulacs and passed it on to the old pockmarked vagabond who, after raising his cap, took a little drop himself and then passed it on to the others.
[11] A wooden field-flask.