They lifted him. “Take him to the inn; out of step, so as not to shake him. I’ll follow later.... ‘Mish,’ did he say?”
A dozen men set off with Cope to Wadsworth, and the Wadsworth men followed, whispering among themselves.
On a shale heap they found the two guns; all their searching did not produce the man who had fired them. A strong guard was left on the spot, and that afternoon the main body advanced as far as Noon Nick without further molestation. Thence they retired half a mile, placing sentries at intervals along the ledge over the rocky bottom and men at various points along the Causeway; and a camp was pitched almost within a stone’s throw of the place that the coining plant had occupied previously to its removal to Brotherton Slack.
The Wadsworth men who had preceded Cope reached the top of the Scout; there they assembled and held a discussion.
“Whose house is he to be ta’en to?” some asked.
“Not mine,” others replied.--“No, nor mine.”--“Nor mine.”
“Ay, that’ll be it. We’ll send ’em to th’ parson’s.”
The litter came up. They would not have this abhorred flesh cross their own thresholds, but the parson did not matter so much. They looked remorselessly on him in his agony, and then told the bearers where he must be taken.
“Well, a parson’ll be what he needs the most,” one of the soldiers replied.
The empty sleeves of the red coat on which Cope lay (it was buttoned about the muskets exactly as Cole the clogger had been wont to button his own jacket over his arms) were tied about his legs to steady him as much as possible for the precipitous descent; then they dropped down an abrupt sheep-track.
From the window of his dining-room, which, of his four ground-floor rooms, was diagonally opposite the little back study, the parson saw the approach of the party. It did not need the glimpse he had between two of the red coats to inform him of what had happened. He fell on his knees to intercede for the unhappy shedders of blood, and he was in that posture when a rat-tat sounded at his own door. He sprang to his feet and passed out to answer the knock.
A trooper informed him briefly that there was nowhere else to take the moribund man. “He’s got it,” he said.
The parson gave a glance at the stretcher. “Bring him into my dining-room,” he said.