“No ghost shall haunt me, Dick,” says he. “Rather shall another ghost keep him company,” and his wry neck moved horribly.
I pointed upward where the tobyman hung in chains, keeping his flocks by moonlight. “There’s your destiny,” said I. “There’s your doom. Now defend, damn ye, for I’ll not prick an adder at a disadvantage.”
He drew his blade, for no man could say that Timothy Grubbe, time-server and traitor as he was, lacked courage. Suddenly he sliced at me, but I put out and turned off the blow.
“If you will have it so soon,” said I, “in God’s name have it,” and I ran upon him.
My third stroke went under his guard, and I took him in the midriff. He gave vent to an oath, cursed me in a torrent, and struck at me weakly as he went down.
He was as dead as mutton almost ere he touched the ground.
I have never been a man of the church, nor do I lay any claim to own more religion than such as to make shift by when it comes to the end. No, nor do I deny that I have sundry offenses on my conscience, some of which I have narrated in my memoirs. But when it comes to a reckoning I will make bold to claim credit in that I rid the world he had encumbered of Timothy Grubbe—the foulest ruffian that ever I did encounter in the length of my days on the road.
I climbed the beam and lowered the poor tobyman, and it took me but a little time to make the change. The one I left where he had paid the quittance in the peace of the earth, and t’other a-swinging under the light of the moon on Gallows Gate.
I have said my journey was done, but that was not so. There was more for me to do, which was to deliver poor Masters at his lady-love’s and break the unhappy news. And so, leaving the carriage where it stood with the patient horses that were cropping the grass, I mounted the mare and began to go down the long limb of the downs to the north.
’Twas late—near midnight—when I reached Effingham and found my way to the manor. I rapped on the door, leaving Calypso and t’other in the shadows of the house, and presently one answered to my knock.