‘Who are you there, watching, following us, skulking behind bushes and hedges?’ shouted Coyshe.
‘What is it?’ asked Miss Jordan, surprised and alarmed.
The surgeon did not answer, but raised to his shoulder a stick he carried.
‘Answer! Who are you? Show yourself, or I fire!’
‘Doctor Coyshe,’ exclaimed Barbara, ‘forbear in pity!’
‘My dear Miss Jordan,’ he said in a low tone, ‘set your mind at rest. I have only an umbrella stick, of which all the apparatus is blown away except the catch. Who is there?’ he cried, again presenting his stick.
‘Once, twice!’—click went the catch. ‘If I call three and fire, your blood be on your own head!’
There issued in response a scream, piercing in its shrillness, inhuman in its tone.
Barbara shuddered, and her horse plunged.
A mocking burst of laughter ensued, and then forth from the bushes into the road leaped an impish boy, who drew a bow over the catgut of a fiddle under his chin, and ran along before them, laughing, leaping, and evoking uncouth and shrill screams from his instrument.