There were a couple of stablemen within hearing, lounging in the doorway, besides the landlord and his wife and the farmers. A villager or two also had dropped in, and there were two peddlers lying half asleep in the corner. All these pricked up their ears more or less at my words. But, like most country folk, they were slow to take in anything new or unexpected; and I had to drink afresh and say again, "Here is bad luck to purveyors!" before any one took it up.
Then the landlord showed he understood.
"Ay, so say I!" he cried, with an oath. "Purveyors, indeed! It is such as they give the Queen a bad name."
"God bless her!" quoth the monk loyally.
"And drown the purveyors!" a farmer exclaimed.
"They were here a year ago, and left us as bare as a shorn sheep," struck in a strapping villager, speaking at a white heat, but telling me no news; for this was what I had heard at Towcester the night before. "The Queen should lie warm if she uses all the wool they took! And the pack-horses they purveyed to carry off the plunder--why, the packmen avoid Stratford ever since as though we had the Black Death! Oh, down with the purveyors, say I! The first that comes this way I will show the bottom of the Ouse. Ay, that I will, though I hang for it!"
"Easy! easy, Tom Miller!" the host interposed, affecting an air of assurance, even while he cast an eye of trouble at his flitches. "It will be another ten years before they harry us again. There is Potter's Pury! They never took a tester's worth from Potter's Pury! No, nor from Preston Gobion! But they will go to them next, depend upon it!"
"I hope they will," I said, with a world of gloomy insinuation in my words. "But I doubt it!"
And this time my hint was not wasted. The landlord changed color. "What are you driving at, master?" he asked mildly, while the others looked at me in silence and waited for more.
"What if there be one across the road now!" I said, giving way to the temptation, and speaking falsely--for which I paid dearly afterward. "A purveyor, I mean, unless I am mistaken in him, or he tells lies. He has come straight from the Chancellor, white wand, warrant, and all. He is taking his dinner now, but he has sent for the hundredman, so I guess he means business."