Mittachip evidently was satisfied with his day’s work. The two hundred guineas he looked upon as a certainty already. After a while, noting the look of stern determination upon his Honour’s face, he turned the conversation to matters of business. He had been collecting some rents for Sir Humphrey and also for Squire West and Lady Rounce, and would have to return to Wirksworth to bank the money.
Since Sir Humphrey Challoner was occupying the only available bedroom at the Moorhen, there would be no room for Master Mittachip and Master Duffy, his clerk. He hoped to reach Brassington by the bridle path before the footpads were astir, thence at dawn on to Wirksworth.
He had shot his poisonous arrow and did not stop to ascertain how far it had gone home. He bade farewell to his employer, with all the deference which many years of intercourse with the quality had taught him, and never mentioned Beau Brocade, Lady Patience or John Stich’s forge again. But when he had bowed and scraped himself out of his Honour’s presence, and was sitting once more beside Master Duffy in the bar-parlour, there was a world of satisfaction in his pale, watery eyes.
In the meanwhile Lady Patience, with Betty by her side, had been walking towards the forge as rapidly as the state of the road permitted.
A sudden turn of the path brought her within sight of the cross-ways and of the old gallows, on which a fragment of rain-spattered rag still fluttered ghostlike in the wind.
But here, within a few yards of her goal, she stopped suddenly, with eyes dilated, and hands pressed convulsively to her heart, in an agony of terror. Walking quickly on the road from Wirksworth towards Stich’s cottage were some half-dozen red-coated figures, the foremost man amongst them wearing three stripes upon his sleeve.
Soldiers with a sergeant at the forge! What could it mean but awful peril for the fugitive?
Her halt had been but momentary, the next instant she was flying down the pathway closely followed by Betty, and had reached the shed just as the soldiers were skirting the cottage towards it.
She glanced within, and gave a quick sigh of relief: there was no sign of her brother, and John was busy at his anvil.
Already the smith had caught sight of her.