Page:A C Doyle - The White Company.djvu/80

56 have seen him with these two eyes on stricken fields and never did man carry himself better. Mon Dieu! yes, ye would not credit it to look at him, or to hearken to his soft voice, but for clear twenty years, there was not skirmish, onfall, sally, bushment, escalado or battle, but Sir Nigel was in the heart of it. I go now to Christchurch with a letter to him from Sir Claude Latour, to ask him if he will take the place of Sir John Hawkwood; and there is the more chance that he will if I bring one or two likely men at my heels. What say you, woodman: wilt leave the bucks to loose a shaft at a nobler mark?'

The forester shook his head. 'I have wife and child at Emery Down,' quoth he; 'I would not leave them for such a venture.'

'You then, young sir?' asked the archer.

'Nay, I am a man of peace,' said Alleyne Edricson. 'Besides, I have other work to do.'

'Peste!' growled the soldier, striking his flagon on the board until the dishes danced again. 'What, in the name of the devil, hath come over the folk? Why sit ye all moping by the fireside, like crows round a dead horse, when there is man's work to be done within a few short leagues of ye? Out upon you all, as a set of laggards and hang-backs! By my hilt! I believe that the men of England are all in France already, and that what is left behind are in sooth the women dressed up in their paltocks and hosen.'

'Archer,' quoth Hordle John, 'you have lied more than once and more than twice; for which, and also because I see much in you to mislike, I am sorely tempted to lay you upon your back.'

'By my hilt! then, I have found a man at last!' shouted the bowman. 'And, 'fore God, you are a better man than I take you for if you can lay me on my back, mon garçon. I have won the ram more times than there are toes to my feet and for seven long years I have found no man in the Company who could make my jerkin dusty'