LOUIS did not submit readily to his captors. At first he was angry; then
he cried, and when some of the men laughed at him for being a baby he
got angry again, and told them they were a band of cowards to set upon
him in this way,—a dozen men on one boy,—and that if they wanted to rob
him they might do it and go about their business. He did not care; he
could walk home.
"No, no, my valiant page," said the leader of the robbers; "we don't
want you to walk and we don't want you to go home. We shall take you
with us now, and we will see about the robbing afterward."
And with this he turned the little horse around, and led him, by a path
which Louis had passed without noticing it, into the depths of the
forest. On the way, the robber asked his young prisoner a great many
questions regarding his family, his connections, and his present
business in riding thus alone through the forest roads. To these
questions Louis was ready enough to give answer, for it was not his
nature to conceal anything, unless he thought it absolutely necessary.
Indeed, he was quite proud of the opportunity thus afforded him of
talking about the rank and importance of his mother, and of dwelling
upon the great power and warlike renown of the nobleman under whom he
served.
"They will not let me stay here long, you may be sure of that," said
Louis. "As soon as they hear that you have carried me off, they will
take me away from you."
"I hope so, indeed," said the robber, laughing; "and if I had not
thought that they would take you from me, I should not have taken the
trouble to capture you."
"Oh, I know what you mean," said the boy. "You expect them to ransom
me."
"I most certainly do," replied the other.
"But they will not do it," cried Louis. "They will come with soldiers
and take me from you!"
"We shall see," returned the robber.
It was almost dark when, by many winding and sometimes almost invisible
paths through the forest, the party reached a collection of rude huts,
which his capture; but this matter did not enter his mind. He went to
sleep with the feeling that what he wanted now was a good night's rest,
and that, in some way or other, all would be right on the morrow.
Michol, the captain of the band, was very plain-spoken, the next
morning, in telling Louis his plans in regard to him. "I know well," he
said, "that your mother is able to pay a handsome ransom for you, and,
if she is so hard-hearted that she will not do it, I can depend on
Barran. He will not let a page from his castle pine away in these woods,
for the sake of a handful of gold."
"My mother is not hard-hearted," said Louis, "and I am not going to pine
away, no matter how long you keep me. Do you intend to send to my mother
to-day?"
"Not so soon as that," replied Michol. "I shall let her have time to
feel what a grievous thing it is to have a son carried away to the heart
of the forest, where she can never find him, and where he must stay,
month after month and year after year, until she pays his worthy captors
what she thinks the boy is worth."
"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Louis. "If you will give me my horse
and my falcon, which your men have taken from me, and will let me have
again my dagger, I will go to Viteau, myself, and tell my mother about
the ransom; and I promise you that she will send you all the money she
can afford to spend for me in that way. And, if there is no one else to
bring it,—for our men might be afraid to venture among so many
robbers,—I shall bring it myself, on my way back to Barran's castle. I
am not afraid to come."
"I am much pleased to hear that, my boy," said Michol, "but I do not
like your plan. When I am ready, I shall send a messenger, and no one
will be afraid to bring me the money, when everything is settled. But
one thing you can do. If you have ever learned to write,—and I have
heard that the Countess of Viteau has taught her sons to be
scholars,—you may write a letter to your mother, and tell her in what a
doleful plight you find yourself, and how necessary it is that she
should send all the money that I ask for. Thus she will see that you are
really my prisoner, and will not delay to come to your assistance. One
of my men, Jasto, will give you a pen and ink, and something to write
your letter on. You may go, now, and look for Jasto. You will know him
by his torn clothes and his thirst for knowledge."
"Torn clothes!" said Louis, as he walked away. "They all have clothes of
that kind. And, as for his thirst for knowledge, I can not see how I am
to find out that. I suppose the Captain wanted to give me something to
do, so as to keep me from troubling him. I am not going to look for any
Jasto. If I could find my horse, and could get a chance, I should jump
on him and gallop away from these fellows."
Louis wandered about among the huts, peering here and there for a sight
of Agnes's little jennet. But he saw nothing of him, for the animal had
been taken away to another part of the forest, to keep company with
other stolen horses. And even if he had been able to mount and ride away
unobserved, it would have been impossible for Louis to find his way
along the devious paths of the forest to the highway. More than this,
although he seemed to be wandering about in perfect liberty, some of the
men had orders to keep their eyes upon the boy, and to stop him if he
endeavored to penetrate into the forest.
"Ho, there!" said a man, whom Louis suddenly met, as he was walking
between two of the huts, "are you looking for anything? What have you
lost?"
"I have lost nothing," said Louis, deeming it necessary to reply only to
the last question.
"I thought you lost your liberty yesterday," said the other, "and,
before that, you must have lost your senses, to be riding alone on a
road, walled in for miles and miles by trees, bushes, and brave
_cotereaux_. But, of course, I did not suppose that you came here to
look for either your liberty or your senses. What is it you want?"
Louis had no intention of telling the man that he was looking for his
horse, and so, as he felt obliged to give some answer, he said:
"I was sent to look for Jasto, so that I could write a letter to my
mother."
"Jasto!" exclaimed the man. "Well, my young page, if you find everything
in the world as easily as you found Jasto, you will do well. I am Jasto.
And do you know how you came to find me?"
"I chanced to meet you," said Louis.
"Not so," said the other. "If I had not been looking for you, you never
would have found me. Things often happen in that manner. If what we are
looking for does not look for us, we never find it. But what is this
about your mother and a letter? Sit down here, in this bit of shade, and
make these things plain to me."
Louis accepted this invitation, for the sun was beginning to be warm,
and he sat down by the man, at the foot of a tree.
"I do not believe you are Jasto," he said, looking at his companion.
"Your clothes are not torn. I was told to look for a man with torn
clothes."
[Illustration: LOUIS FINDS ONE OF THE HIGHWAYMEN A GOOD-NATURED FELLOW.]
"Torn clothes!" exclaimed the other. "What are you talking of? Not torn?
Why, boy, my clothes are more torn and are worse torn and have staid
torn longer than the clothes of any man in all our goodly company. But
they have been mended, you see, and that is what makes them observable
among so many sadly tattered garments."
Louis looked at the coarse jerkin, breeches, and stockings of the man
beside him. They were, certainly, torn and ripped in many places, and
the torn places were of many curious shapes, as if the wearer had been
making a hurried journey through miles of bramble bushes; but all the
torn places were carefully mended with bright-red silk thread, which
made them more conspicuous than if they had not been mended at all.
"I see that they have been torn," said Louis, "but they are not torn
now."
"A great mistake, my good sir page—a great mistake," said the other;
"once torn, always torn. If my clothes are mended, that but gives them
another quality. Then they have two qualities. They are torn and they
are mended. If one's clothes are torn, the only way to have clothes that
are not torn is to have new ones. Think of that, boy, and make no rents
in yourself nor in your clothes. Although mending can be done very
well," he added, looking complacently at his breeches, "the evil of it
is, though, that it always shows."
"I could mend better than that," said Louis.
"That is to be hoped; it is truly to be hoped," said the other, "for you
have had better chances than I. This red silk, left in our hands by a
fair lady, who was taking it to waste it in embroidery in some friend's
castle, was all the thread I had for my mending. Now, you could have all
things suitable for your mending, whether of clothes or of mind or of
body, if it should so happen that you should have rents in any of these.
But tell me, now, about your letter."
"There is nothing to tell," said Louis, "excepting that your Captain
wishes me to write a letter to my mother, urging her to send good ransom
for me, and that he said you could give me pen and ink and something to
write upon."
"Pen and ink are well enough," said the man, who, as Louis now believed,
was really Jasto, "for I can make them. But something to write on is a
more difficult matter to find. Paper is too scarce, and parchment costs
too much; and so there is none of either in this company. But I shall
see to it that you have something to write on when you are ready to
write. It strikes me that the chief trouble will be to put together the
three things—the pen and the ink and the something to write on—in such a
manner as to make a letter of them. Did you ever write a letter?"
"Not yet. But I know how to do it," said Louis; and, as he spoke, he
remembered how he had promised his brother to write a letter to him. He
was now going to send a letter to Viteau, but under what strange
circumstances it would be written! If he were at the castle, Agnes would
help him. He wished he had thought of asking her, weeks ago, to help
him.
"I have written a letter myself," said Jasto, "but before I had written
it I trembled to say I could do it. And I was a grown man, and had
fought in three battles. But pages are bolder than soldiers. Would you
like to hear about my letter?"
"Indeed I should," said Louis, anxious to listen to anything which might
give him a helping hint regarding the duty he had taken upon himself.
"Well, then," said Jasto, stretching out his legs, "I shall tell you
about my letter. It was just before——"
"Jasto!" rang out a voice from the opposite side of the inclosure formed
by the huts.
"There!" cried Jasto, jumping to his feet, "that is the Captain. I must
go. But you sit still, just where you are, and when I come back, which
will be shortly, I shall tell you about my letter."
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