At last the famous vehicle came in sight, but only slowly, although the road was quite good. What could have happened?
CHAPTER IV.
Now what had really happened to the coach was that it had lost one of the big screws out of the hind wheel, so that the latter had come off. For a whole hour had they hunted for the screw without success, and then they tried to get on without it, but that was a difficult business. If a peasant loses a wheel-nail, he can easily find a substitute; the screw of a coach, however, is not so easily replaced. What straps and ropes they had to hand were knotted and wound round the axle, but the quickly rotating nave had in a few minutes torn all to shreds, and would not go round properly, much to the detriment of the horses who now had to drag the lumbering conveyance with a wheel that would not work, through the tough, sticky morass, which made the way much more toilsome.
Not that this affected the merry mood of the president as he took his place inside. Every now and again he whistled for sheer lightness of heart.
"Fire away, there!" he cried to the driver.
But the driver was not equal to the task, as he urged his steeds over the morass through which the four slow old hacks dragged the rickety vehicle with its broken-down wheel.
Meanwhile, on a hillock which rose tolerably steep from the roadside, waited a horseman mounted on a strong wiry beast, that stood with his muzzle snuffing the ground like a setter scenting the trail, with watchful eyes and pricked ears, but so still that he did not even brush off the flies that settled on his withers and flanks. The man himself in the saddle was equally motionless; he was dark and hawk-eyed, with curly hair, and a tapering pointed moustache. He wore a peasant's garb that was scrupulously fine of its kind, his countryman's cloak being richly embroidered, and his sleeves frilled with wide lace. In his cap he wore a cluster of locks of women's hair and a knot of artificial flowers; at his girdle gleamed a pair of silver inlaid Turkish pistols, while from the pommel of his saddle hung another, double-barrelled, and in his right hand he carried an axe. An alder-bush had hidden the stranger up till now, so that he could not be seen by the coaching party till he himself hailed them.
"Now you traitor, you knave, are you going to stop or not?"
Was the coachman going to stop? Yes indeed, he sprang down from his box in terror, promptly crawled under the coach, and whimpered, "Alack, your honour, it's Gyöngyöm Miska himself, it is indeed!"