"True they are, and see you to't my horse and weapons be rendered up to me straightways! But this lady swore what she thought true. She had good reason for so thinking, and village rogues would best use fair words to her!"
He cast a side-glance at Anne, as he finished speaking; but at that instant she turned her back upon him, and went from the room, as swiftly as the crowd could let her. Hal, perforce, stayed to be unbound by the rustics that had held him. At the further orders of the constable, who speedily dwindled into obsequious nothingness under the swaggering disdain of Captain Bottle, Hal's weapons were restored to him. When he went out to the road, he found his horse ready, with Kit's and Anthony's. The huge coach, recently used by the rustics to obstruct the way, had been moved back into the lane. Hal remarked aloud upon this, as he made ready to mount.
"Ay, your worship," said a villager, who had overheard him, "we opened the way again, when the lady rode off a minute ago."
"The lady!" cried Hal, and exchanged a blank look with Kit and Anthony. He had lost sight of her, while being released and repossessed of his weapons. "A plague on my dull wits!" he added, for the ears of his two men alone. "She hath gone to try the same game in the next parish, and fortune will scarce favor me with such another choice organ of the law as this constable!"
Meanwhile, in the ale-house, the constable, after some meditation, called for ale to be brought to the table at which he had been sitting, and said, thoughtfully, to his ally of the pen and ink-horn:
"Thou mayst tear what thou hast taken down of the examination, William."
And William, muddled by participation in the recent rush of events, absently tore to pieces his sheet of paper, on which he had written nothing.