“We will turn it back if we meet it. Good night!” At the word the lieutenant and his men marched off to the south, and Armstrong was taken in charge by the squadron of horse. A trooper was dismounted and his steed given to Armstrong, of whom no questions were asked, as he had expected. They seemed very sure of their man. The cavalry set off to the North, and De Courcy rode close beside his enemy, taking a delight in taunting him. To this enforced companionship the Scot objected and made appeal to the colonel.
“Sir, am I your prisoner, or do I belong to this renegade King’s man? Who is in authority here,—you, or this Frenchman?”
To this the colonel made no reply, nor did he order De Courcy to the rear, probably not wishing to offend one who seemed to be a friend of Cromwell’s. The angry Scot was forced to make the best of it in silence, while the Frenchman, very polite and jocular, pressed ironic services upon him, asked after the girl, and said he would use his influence with Cromwell to have a silken rope used at the coming execution of so distinguished a spy. It is ill to tamper with a Border temper, as the Frenchman soon discovered. Armstrong slipped his knife from his belt and held it in readiness, when his attention was drawn to the trampling of an approaching host in front of them, and he remembered that here was coming the troop from Lichfield, which expected to meet a body of the King’s men if the rumour from Birmingham were true. The rumour had no doubt been started by the riding North in hot haste of this courtier now at his side, at a time when such costume was not seen outside Oxford. Besides, the country was in a constant state of alarm, and the wildest tales were current, whose constant contradiction by afterevents did nothing to allay ever-recurring panic. Armstrong quietly gathered up his reins, watched his opportunity, and, instead of running his blade between the ribs of De Courcy, jabbed the point into the flank of the Frenchman’s horse.
CHAPTER V.—SANCTUARY.
However graceful the Frenchman might be on foot, and no one denied his elegance of bearing, he was but an amateur on horseback, and when his steed unexpectedly plunged forward he relinquished the reins and grasped the mane. For one brief moment the attention of the troop was diverted toward the unexplained antics of the maddened horse and the imminent overthrow of its rider. It is one of the defects of human nature that man is prone to laugh when he sees a fellow creature in some predicament from which his own superior skill leaves him free. Every man in the company was a faultless rider, and nothing their horses could do would have been any embarrassment to them. To see this dandified foreigner, whom at heart they despised in any case, crouching like a gaudily dressed monkey on a frolicsome dog, and screaming for help, was too much for even the saddest of them, and a roar of laughter went up which did nothing toward quieting the injured and frightened quadruped. If it had been the horse of Armstrong that had begun these dancings, his guards would have been instantly on the alert for an attempted escape, but at the very moment their eyes should have been on the Scot their attention was withdrawn. Armstrong did not laugh, but, thrusting back his knife, whipped out his sword, and struck De Courcy’s horse twice with the broad of it. His own steed leaped forward under the prick of the spur, and before the colonel could give a word of command the two had disappeared in the fog ahead. Even then the colonel, who was the only man that had his wits about him, did not think there was the least chance of escape, for he had heard the troop coming toward him, and Armstrong must run directly into it. He rose in his stirrups to give the alarm to those ahead, when all heard a ringing shout: “Charge, cavaliers! God save the King! To hell with the Roundheads! Charge!”
Out of the fog came a spattering fire, then a volley. Two horses and three men went down, while the other troopers hastily unslung their carbines and fired down the street without waiting for the word of command.
“Stop, you fools!” yelled the colonel, “you are shooting your own men.” Then to the oncomers he roared a like warning, which was drowned in another volley. The Lichfield men were not to be taken in, even if they had heard the warning. With their own eyes they had seen two cavaliers burst upon them out of the fog with a strident cry for the King. De Courcy, coming first, they concentrated upon him, and he went down before them. Armstrong, swinging his sword, smiting right and left, bellowing like a fiend in true cavalier style, a very Prince Rupert come again, dashed at the weakest spot, and his impetuosity carried all before him.
“Never mind him,” cried the leader, as some would have pursued. “Fire, and break their charge,” and fire they did right stoutly, until a maddened officer, with a bravery that scorned the bullets around him, galloped along their front, waving his sword and commanding them to stop.