"Leave me and shape your own course, Master Hammond!" exclaimed the Captain composedly, for he had regained both his breath and his wits. "You can do no more, and I'll warrant I can shift for myself."
So saying, he wriggled along the ground over the bank that screened us from the soldiers, and lay hidden in the bracken on the same side of the highway as the troopers.
Meanwhile, filled with anxiety on the behalf of Jeremy Miles--for he was always a general favourite amongst the youths in and around Lymington--Constance and I resumed our way, endeavouring to appear as unconcerned as possible.
Less than a minute must have passed since we saw Captain Miles's great frame disappear beneath the bracken, when we heard the clatter of the troopers' horses as their hoofs struck the road. Knowing that it would ill play our part to refrain from curiosity, we stopped and looked back at the pursuing soldiers.
They were of the same troop that we had seen in Lyndhurst a short half-hour ago. Great, swarthy men they were, hardened to cruelty by reason of their service at Tangiers, and, though I knew it not at the time, ready to practise the barbarities acquired from the Moors upon their own countrymen, as many a poor peasant of the marshes of Somerset had learned to his cost.
"Curse him!" exclaimed one, with an oath. "Where hath he gone? Are we to let a guinea slip through our fingers after all our trouble?"
"He's not far away," replied his comrade, pointing with an exclamation of triumph to the partially concealed tracks on the road. "See, he hath had a fall. Methinks we have him by the heels."
"'Tis like looking for a sprat in the ocean," returned the first trooper, gazing across the wilderness of gorse. "So long as he stuck to his mount we could have tracked him. 'Tis what I feared: he hath made off afoot."
"Here, sirrah," he shouted to me, urging his horse down the road to where we were, "hast seen aught of a horseman riding like Beelzebub?"
"Nay," I replied truthfully enough; "no horseman has passed this way."