The Tavern Knight | Page 7

Crispin accounted him leastways honest, and had a

kindness for him in spite of all. He crossed to the window, and
throwing it wide he leaned out, as if to breathe the cool night air, what
time he hummed the refrain of `Rub-a-dub-dub' for the edification of
any chance listeners.
For a half-hour he lingered there, and for all that he used the occasion
to let his mind stray over many a theme, his eyes were alert for the least
movement among the shadows of the street. Reassured at last that the
house was no longer being watched, he drew back, and closed the
lattice.
Upstairs he found the Irishman seated in dejection upon his bed,
awaiting him.
"Soul of my body!" cried Hogan ruefully, "I was never nearer being
afraid in my life."
Crispin laughed softly for answer, and besought of him the tale of what
had passed.
"Tis simple enough, faith," said Hogan coolly. "The landlord of The
Angel hath a daughter maybe 'twas after her he named his inn - who
owns a pair of the most seductive eyes that ever a man saw perdition in.
She hath, moreover, a taste for dalliance, and my brave looks and
martial trappings did for her what her bold eyes had done for me. We
were becoming the sweetest friends, when, like an incarnate fiend, that
loutish clown, her lover, sweeps down upon us, and, with more
jealousy than wit, struck me - struck me, Harry Hogan! Soul of my
body, think of it, Cris!" And he grew red with anger at the recollection.
"I took him by the collar of his mean smock and flung him into the
kennel - the fittest bed he ever lay in. Had he remained there it had
been well for him; but the fool, accounting himself affronted, came up
to demand satisfaction. I gave it him, and plague on it - he's dead!"
"An ugly tale," was Crispin's sour comment.
"Ugly, maybe," returned Hogan, spreading out his palms, "but what
choice had I? The fool came at me, bilbo in hand, and I was forced to

draw.'
"But not to slay, Hogan!"
"Twas an accident. Sink me, it was! I sought his sword-arm; but the
light was bad, and my point went through his chest instead."
For a moment Crispin stood frowning, then his brow cleared, as though
he had put the matter from him.
"Well, well - since he's dead, there's an end to it."
"Heaven rest his soul!" muttered the Irishman, crossing himself piously.
And with that he dismissed the subject of the great wrong that through
folly he had wrought - the wanton destruction of a man's life, and the
poisoning of a woman's with a remorse that might be everlasting.
"It will tax our wits to get you out of Penrith," said Crispin. Then,
turning and looking into the Irishman's great, good-humoured face - "I
am sorry you leave us, Hogan," he added.
"Not so am I," quoth Hogan with a shrug. "Such a march as this is little
to my taste. Bah! Charles Stuart or Oliver Cromwell, 'tis all one to me.
What care I whether King or Commonwealth prevail? Shall Harry
Hogan be the better or the richer under one than under the other?
Oddslife, Cris, I have trailed a pike or handled a sword in well-nigh
every army in Europe. I know more of the great art of war than all the
King's generals rolled into one. Think you, then, I can rest content with
a miserable company of horse when plunder is forbidden, and even our
beggarly pay doubtful? Whilst, should things go ill - as well they may,
faith, with an army ruled by parsons - the wage will be a swift death on
field or gallows, or a lingering one in the plantations, as fell to the lot
of those poor wretches Noll drove into England after Dunbar. Soul of
my body, it is not thus that I had looked to fare when I took service at
Perth. I had looked for plunder, rich and plentiful plunder, according to
the usages of warfare, as a fitting reward for a toilsome march and the
perils gone through.

"Thus I know war, and for this have I followed the trade these twenty
years. Instead, we have thirty thousand men, marching to battle as prim
and orderly as a parcel of acolytes in a Corpus-Christi procession.
'Twas not so bad in Scotland haply because the country holds naught a
man may profitably plunder - but since we have crossed the Border,
'slife, they'll hang you if you steal so much as a kiss from a wench in
passing."
"Why, true," laughed Crispin, "the Second Charles hath an over-tender
stomach. He will not allow that we are marching through an