Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/135

Rh bones! I have not thrown a good main since I left Navarre. A one and a three! En avant, camarade!'

'Pour and three,' cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, 'that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!'

'Mon Dieu!' he growled, 'I am like to reach Christ-church in my shirt.' Then suddenly glancing up, 'Holà, by the splendour of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes.' He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair. 'Hast come to stop?' cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. 'Shall not get away from us again!'

'I wish no better,' said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting.

'Well said, lad!' cried big John. 'We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken.'

'I have in good sooth,' Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose.

'What then?' asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin.

'I am back for Minstead, lad.'

'And why, in the name of sense?'