Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/171

 "Aha!" cries he; "and you are French, too! Your tongue bewrays you. Two Frenchmen coming into an ale-house, severally and accidentally, not knowing each other, at ten of the clock at night, in the middle of Bedfordshire? No, sir, that shall not pass! You are all prisoners escaping, if you are nothing worse. Consider yourselves under arrest. I have to trouble you for your papers."

"Where is your warrant, if you come to that?" said I. "My papers! A likely thing that I would show my papers on the ipse dixit of an unknown fellow in a hedge alehouse!"

"Would you resist the law?" says he.

"Not the law, sir," said I. "I hope I am too good a subject for that. But for a nameless fellow with a bald head and a pair of gingham small-clothes, why, certainly! 'Tis my birthright as an Englishman. Where's Magna Charta, else?"

"We will see about that," says he; and then, addressing the assistants, "where does the constable live?"

"Lord love you, sir!" cried the landlord, "what are you thinking of? The constable at past ten at night! Why, he's abed and asleep, and good and drunk two hours agone!"

"Ah, that a' be!" came in chorus from the yokels.

The attorney's clerk was put to a stand. He could not think of force; there was little sign of martial ardour about the landlord, and the peasants were indifferent—they only listened, and gaped, and now scratched a head and now would get a light to their pipes from the embers on the hearth. On the other hand, the Major and I put a bold front on the business and defied him, not without some ground of law. In this state of matters he proposed I should go along with him to one Squire Merton, a great man of the neighbourhood, who was in the commission of