"It may be so; I know not," said Anthony, with sour indifference; and the two made for the road together.
"Well, see that Kit and you follow speedily, while I fly forward to stay that lady, lest we be caught 'twixt Barnet's men behind us, and a hue and cry in front!" Whereupon, without more ado, Hal spurred his horse in the direction that Anne had taken, while Anthony turned southward in quest of Bottle.
As Hal sped along, he did not dare confess which of the two motives more fed his anxious impatience: solicitude for his own cause, or fear that Anne might meet danger on the road,—for he recalled what the countryman had told him of highway robbers infesting the neighborhood.
He put four miles behind him, neither winning glimpse of her nor being overtaken by Kit and Anthony. Seeking naught in the forward distance but her figure—now so distinct in his imagination, so painfully absent from his real vision,—he paid no heed, until he had galloped into the very midst of it, to a numerous crowd of heavy-shod countrymen that lined both sides of the road at the entrance to the village of Clown.
So impetuous had been Hal's forward movement, so complete the possession of his mind by the one image, that he had seen this village assemblage with dull eyes, and with no sense of its possibly having anything to do with himself; yet it was just such a gathering that he ought to have expected, and against which he ought to have been on his guard. Not until it closed about him, not until a huge loutish fellow caught the rein of his suddenly impeded horse, and a pair of rustics drew across the road—from a side lane—a clumsy covered coach that wholly blocked the way, and a little old man on the edge of the crowd brandished a rusty bill and called out in a squeaky voice, "Surrender!" did Hal realize that he had ridden right into the hands of a force hastily gathered by the village constable to waylay and take him prisoner.
Hal clapped hand to sword-hilt, and surveyed the crowd with a sweeping glance. The constable had evidently brought out every able-bodied man in the near neighborhood. Three or four were armed with long bills, hooked and pointed, like that borne by the constable himself. Others carried stout staves. Emboldened by the example of the giant who had seized Hal's rein, the clowns pressed close around his horse. Ere Hal could draw sword, his wrist was caught in the iron grasp of one of the giant's great brown paws. Two other burly villagers laid hold of his pistols. With his free hand, Hal tried to back his horse out of the press, but was prevented both by the throng behind and by the big fellow's gripe of the rein. Marryott thereupon flashed out his dagger, and essayed to use it upon the hand that imprisoned his wrist. But his arm was caught, in the elbow crook, by the hook of a bill that a yeoman wielded in the nick of time. The next instant, a heavy blow from a stave struck the dagger from Hal's hand. His legs were seized, and he was a captured man.
All this had occurred in short time, during the plunging of Hal's horse and the shouting of the crowd. It had been a vastly different matter from the night encounter with Mistress Hazlehurst's servants. These yokels of Clown, assembled in large number, led by the parish Hercules, bearing the homely weapons to which they were used, opposing afoot and by daylight a solitary mounted man to whom their attack was a complete surprise, were a force from whom defeat was no disgrace. Yet never did Master Marryott know keener rage, humiliation, and self-reproach —self-reproach for his heedless precipitancy, and his having ridden on without his two men—than when he found himself captive to these rustics; save when, a moment later, his glance met an open casement of an ale-house at one side of the road, and he saw Anne Hazlehurst! Her look was one of triumph; her smile like that with which he had greeted her after the incident of the locked door at Oakham. And, for the space of that moment, he hated her.
"Sir Valentine Fleetwood," cried the constable, in his senile squeak, pushing his way with a sudden access of pomposity from his place at the crowd's edge, "I apprehend you for high treason, and charge you to get down from your horse and come peaceably to the justice's house."
"Justice's house!" cried Hal, most wrathfully. "Of what do you prate, old fool? What have I to do with scurvy, rustical justices?"