Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/375

Rh speech of old Samkin Aylward,' said the voice, amid a buzz from the ranks. 'Wherever there are knocks going there is Sammy in the heart of it. But who are these ill-faced rogues who block the path? To your kennels, canaille! What! you dare look us in the eyes? Out swords, lads, and give them the flat of them! Waste not your shafts upon such runagate knaves.'

There was little fight left in the peasants, however, still dazed by the explosion, amazed at their own losses, and disheartened by the arrival of the disciplined archers. In a very few minutes they were in full flight for their brushwood homes, leaving the morning sun to rise upon a blackened and blood-stained ruin, where it had left the night before the magnificent castle of the Seneschal of Auvergne. Already the white lines in the east were deepening into pink as the archers gathered round the keep and took counsel how to rescue the survivors.

'Had we a rope,' said Alleyne, 'there is one side which is not yet on fire, down which we might slip.'

'But how to get a rope?'

'It is an old trick,' quoth Aylward. 'Holà! Johnston, cast me up a rope, even as you did at Maupertius in the war time.'

The grizzled archer thus addressed took several lengths of rope from his comrades, and knotting them firmly together, he stretched them out in the long shadow which the rising sun threw from the frowning keep. Then he fixed the yew-stave of his bow upon end and measured the long thin black line which it threw upon the turf.

'A six-foot stave throws a twelve-foot shadow,' he muttered. The keep throws a shadow of sixty paces. Thirty paces of rope will be enow and to spare. Another strand, Watkin! Now pull at the end that all may be safe. So! It is, ready for them.'

'But how are they to reach it?' asked the young archer beside him.

'Watch and see, young fool's-head,' growled the old