ALONG THE NORTH ROAD
On the North Road there is a small inn, rather dilapidated and not
attractive to travellers. Its customers are yokels from the neighbouring
village, but occasionally a gentleman may be found warming himself at
the open hearth and drinking the best that the house contains. Such a
gentleman invariably rides a good horse, and is the recipient of
open-mouthed admiration from the yokels. No gentleman but a highwayman
would be there, they believe.
Only one man remained in the bar to-night, a jovial fellow of the farmer
type, a lover of horses by his talk, and he was wont to boast that he
had made the fortune of more than one gentleman of the road by the
animal he had sold him.
"Shut the door, landlord. I'll wait a bit, and have another tankard of
ale. I'm expecting a visitor."
"Who may that be?"
"One you know well enough, but perhaps you haven't seen him for some
time."
In a few minutes there was a sharp knock at the door, and, when the
landlord opened it, there entered a man wearing a brown mask and
carrying a shapeless parcel under his arm.
"'Galloping Hermit!'" exclaimed the landlord, and it was evident that he
was pleased to see his visitor.
"So you got my message," said the highwayman to the farmer.
"Aye, but I doubt if I've got a horse to sell that you would care to
ride. What's become o' that mare o' yourn?"
"She's in the stables--I've just put her there. I want you to take her."
"Buy her? Well, I'll look at her, but buying and selling are two
different things."
"Do you suppose I'd sell her?" was the answer. "No; I want you to take
her and keep her--keep her until she dies, and then bury her in the
corner of some quiet field. You're honest, and will do it if you say you
will; and here's gold to pay you well for your trouble. She's done her
work, and the last few days have finished her. She had to help me save a
woman in the West Country, and it's broken her."
"I'll do it," said the farmer. "And you'll be wanting another horse?"
"Not yet. When I do you shall hear from me. Will you take the mare
to-night? If I looked at her again I do not think I could let her go."
"Aye, it's like that with horses, we know," said the sympathetic farmer.
"I'll take her to-night."
The landlord went to the stables with him, and when he returned found
the highwayman standing in deep thought before the fire.
"I'm tired, friend. Is there a hole I can sleep in until daylight?"
"Of course."
"I must start at daybreak."
"What! Without a horse?"
"Yes, and without this," he said, taking off his brown mask, showing the
landlord his features for the first time. "To-night 'Galloping Hermit'
ceases to exist."
He kicked the dying embers into a blaze, and dropped the mask into the
fire.
"That's the end of it. Show me this sleeping hole of mine," he said,
taking up his parcel from the floor. "What clothes I leave in it you may
have. I shall not want them any more."
With the dawn a man came out of the inn. He looked at the sky, and up
the road, and down it. Under his arm he carried a fiddle and a bow.
There fell from his lips a little cadence of notes, soft, low, not a
laugh, nor yet a sigh, yet with something of content in it.
"For the love of a woman," he murmured, and then he went along the road
northwards, his figure slowly lessening in the distance until it
vanished over the brow of the hill which the morning sunlight had just
touched.
THE END