"Men of Nappa, salute!" he cried, his voice big and hearty as his body.
Joan Grant, surprised in the middle of a love-dream, saw a hundred and twenty men lifting six-foot pikes to salute her. The stress of it was so quick and overwhelming that it braced her for the moment. She took the salute with grace and a smile that captured these rough-riding gentry. Then, with odd precision, she dropped her kerchief under the nose of Kit’s horse.
He stooped sharply and picked it up at the end of his pike. "A good omen, lads!" he cried. "White horses—and the white kerchief for the King!"
Then it was forward again; and Joan, looking after them, was aware that already her knight was in the making. And then she fell into a flood of tears, because women are made up of storm and sun, like the queer northern weather.
"It’s a pity about that corn o’ mine, all the same," said the Squire, with a last backward thought. "There never was such a harvest year, since back into the ’twenties."
"There’ll be such a harvest year, I trust," laughed Blake, "as will bring more like you to the King. I would that every dale of the north gave us a company like yours—men and horses riding as if they’d been reared together from the cradle. I tell you sir, Prince Rupert would enrol you all at sight, if there were not more urgent need for you at Skipton."
"As a plain man to a plain man, what does the King ask of us?" asked the Squire of Nappa. "Mr. Lambert, you say, is laying siege to Skipton. He should know better. I knew him as a lad, when he lived out yonder at Calton-in-Craven, and he had naught in common with these thick-headed rogues who are out against the King. He’s of the gentry, and always will be."
"He has lost his way in the dark, then," said the other drily. "He’s training his cannon on Skipton Castle as if he liked the enterprise."
"So you want us to ride through Lambert’s men and into the castle to help garrison it?" asked Squire Metcalf, with his big simplicity, his assurance that the men he led would charge through any weight of odds.
"Heaven save us, no! The governor has enough men to feed already, men of usual size; your little company would eat up his larder in a week."
"We _have_ fairish appetites," the Squire admitted. "Big sacks need a lot of filling, as the saying goes. Still, you said the King wanted us, and we’ve left a fine harvest to rot where it stands."