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My handwriting is peculiar; you couldn't imitate it, while you would certainly be hanged when the troopers laid hands on you." This was incontrovertible logic, and the two outlaws drawing apart conferred with each other softly, while I debated what I should do. The casement was a double one, but I felt sure I could drive a bullet through one of them.
To his surprise, he found Abdool and the troopers all mounted, as well as a party of the rajah's own guard. Before leaving, the rajah had returned his sword to him. As he rode through the streets, followed by his own troopers and with the rajah's guard riding ahead, the people looked on with curiosity, but evinced no animosity against him.
I have read a letter from the officer who commanded the cavalry and who directed the charge, in which he tells the whole story confidentially to a brother officer. He speaks of his prisoners, but there is no reference to any brutality upon the part of the troopers. Mr. Stead makes a great deal of some extracts from the letters of private soldiers at the front who talk of bayonetting their enemies.
The second coach was occupied by his chaplains, and a third by his body-servants; in his own he took only his secretary; each vehicle carried a part of his voluminous luggage. After the coaches rode the footmen, mounted on all sorts of beasts, such as could be had, but wearing good liveries and all well armed. A dozen papal troopers commanded by a sergeant brought up the rear.
And in these wretched saps amid a horror of desolation Mac and his cobbers passed every second twenty-four hours. In the day-time the sun beat into them with unrelieved violence, and many troopers squeezed into the bomb-proof shelters and tunnel entrances to seek shade. There was no where to cook food, and bully beef, biscuits and water formed the fare.
The other carriage which, despite its plain and sombre colours, still had an air of grandeur and almost of royalty, with its great wheels and curved springs turned to the left and headed for Toledo. Behind it clattered a dozen troopers, picked men, with huge swinging swords and travel-stained clothes. The dust rose in a cloud under the horses' feet and hovered in the sullen air.
"It is a habit of mine," said he, with a glint of humour in his eye. But there was no answering smile from her. Her face was all anxiety. "Beware of pitfalls," she bade him. "Go warily; they are cruelly cunning, those folk of Condillac. And if evil should befall you..." "There would still remain Rabecque and the troopers," he concluded. She shrugged her shoulders.
She had known horses from early years, in which she had tumbled from her pony's back in the stable-yard, and she knew how to train a horse to a gait and how to master a beast's fear; and even some of the tricks of the troopers in the Fort Myer drill she had surreptitiously practised in the meadow back of the Claiborne stable.
I put the paper in my breast, with as much indifference as I could assume; and as I did so, he gave a sharp order. The troopers began to form on the edge above; the men who had descended to climb the bank again. As the group behind him began to open and melt away, I caught sight of a white robe in the middle of it.
The officer, after dispersing the crowd, seized the furious Master Himboldt, and, while some of the troopers bore him off to prison, two friends picked up the unfortunate Chamberlain, who was covered with blood, and carried him home. Such was the unfortunate outcome of the well-meant and honest attempt to procure the horse-dealer satisfaction for the injustice that had been committed against him.
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