This had scarcely been done when the horn of the Lancaster coach was heard in the distance, and some further waiting ensued.
“Let's hope you'll have no traffic out of, it when it does come,” said Robbie with a dash of spite. A few minutes afterwards the late coach drove into the yard and discharged its travellers.
Two of these, who were going forward to Carlisle, climbed the ladder and took seats behind Robbie. It was too dark to see who or what they were except that they were men, that they were wrapped in long cloaks, and wore caps that fitted close to their heads and cheeks, being tied over their beards and beneath their chins.
The much-maligned Jim now gave a smart whip to his horses, and in a moment more the coach was on the road.
The night was dark and bitterly cold, and once outside the town the glimmer of the lamps which the coach carried was all the light the passengers had for miles.
A slight headache from which Robbie had suffered at intervals since the ducking of his head in the river at Wythburn had now quite disappeared, but a curious numbness, added to a degree of stupefaction, began to take its place. As the coach jogged along on its weary journey, not even the bracing surroundings of Robbie's present elevated and exposed position had the effect of keeping him actively awake. He dozed in short snatches and awoke with slight shudders, feeling alternately hot and cold.
In one of his intervals of wakefulness he heard fragments of a conversation which was being sustained by the strangers behind him. Robbie had neither activity nor curiosity to waste on their talk, but he could not avoid listening.
“He would have been the best agent in the King's service to a certainty,” said one. “He's the 'cutest man I ever tackled. It's parlish odd how he baffles us.”
The speaker was clearly a Cumbrian.
“Shaf!” replied his companion, in a kind of whisper, “he's a pauchtie clot-heed. I'll have him at Haribee in a crack.”