Joe fell back wondering.
Before night, being no fool, he had guessed their objective. They were not riding to the attack of Aldworth’s little force, or to rake in the remnants of Bellamy’s gang, but to make a raid, in Tom’s absence, upon the unsuspecting community from which the best men were absent.
They halted for the night in a sheltered hollow, having accomplished the last miles with cautious movements under all available cover. They had met no man, and felt some confidence that no one had seen them.
In the morning the distance would be short, and the horses fresh for the double burdens which they must bear should the raid succeed in its object.
As they halted, the Captain came up to Joe. Being in good spirits, he spoke with a renewed affability: “I keep my word. You shall have the girl if we get her, as I intend we shall. If we don’t, you shall pick from the others.” He went on: “Do you know where Tom Aldworth lives?” Joe had to confess to an unusual ignorance. “It is no matter; Rentoul does. You’ll go there with him and Bryan. It will need men who can ride. Tom has a wife, and there are two children. I don’t know whether they’re hers. Bring the lot.” He added: “There’ll be no fighting there, unless Tom’s back,”
Joe made no objection. It sounded easy work—with two others to do it. He was quite sure that Tom would not be back.
They lay quietly during the night, no fires being allowed, and a wide ring of covert sentinels protecting them from the risk of unsuspected observation.
In the morning their Captain showed no haste to move, and the sun was high when he called them together, and explained his purpose: “Boys,” he said, “we haven’t moved early, because we’re giving the men time to leave the houses, and get scattered. You can shoot any that come your way. The more the better. But I want quick work, and I don’t want you to get hurt. You’re more use alive. If they’ve got guns, they’ll have left them at home, and by when they get back we shan’t be there. But if they were all at home, it would be just a fight from house to house. It isn’t shooting we want here.
“We shall ride straight past the mine, and on to Cowley Thorn. Troop Two will take the houses up the stream. Troop Three will go through the village. Troop Four will keep with me, except Bryan and Rentoul, who know their job already. Fifteen women’s the catch we want. I won’t go with less. But we don’t want fighting here. Only speed. Each troop keeps together. You must get the best catch you can. I don’t promise you each the one you carry off. It’s team work. But the better you catch, the better for all.
“I’ll tell you where we meet again, when we pass the spot. After that, we ride south. They won’t expect that, and they’ll probably lose the track—if they follow at all. But they don’t ride, mostly.
“Two miles out, we shall put the women down, and they’ll be walked home by Barton and Pleshleigh Ash. Troop Two will guard them. They won’t be followed. If any follow us at all, they’ll come on after the hoof-marks. We’ll make them clear in the right place.
“We shall go on from there, and scout for Tom Aldworth’s lot. He’s fair sure to come back by the highroad. We ought to make an ambush there that they won’t live long to remember.”
He spoke with confidence. He believed, with some reason, that he had trained his men to a far higher efficiency than that of any that they were likely to encounter. And he felt that the plan was good. He might have attacked Tom first, but the advantage of surprise might have been lost at the village, and this was essential. The men there, and along the adjoining coast, were formidable from their numbers, though not otherwise to be accounted seriously. Surprise was everything. He had not meant to make such a move till the days were shorter, but the opportunity of Tom’s absence, and of defeating him separately when he should have been presumably exhausted by previous fighting, was too good to be lost.
It was about an hour to midday when they descended the road that showed the ruined mining village on its northern side, and observed that there was a single erection with evidence of occupation, and that a woman was cleaning her doorstep before it.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Captain Cooper reined his horse, and looked down at the kneeling Martha. Martha wrung out her flannel, and looked up at the Captain.
He would never be a graceful horseman, but he sat the great bay he was riding easily enough. He looked fit to lead in a better cause than that in which he was now engaged.
He said: “It seems to take a long while to clean it.”
She answered quickly: “There’s some cleans what they don’t dirty, an’ there’s some as dirties what they don’t clean.”
There was a possibility of meaning here which he did not probe. Instead, he asked: “Where’s the gaffer?”
“I’m gaffer here,” she said shortly.
“Come, missus, you don’t live here alone.”
“The children’s up for the berries in Cowley Wood. They don’t stay home all the day,” she answered.
Captain Cooper looked at her veteran figure, and at the meagre, burn-scared face, with the straggly wisps of greying hair around it. He looked back at his men: “Anyone want her?” he asked, with a sardonic smile. The men grinned in answer. The long line of horsemen were in motion again. Martha turned into the house. The clatter of horses became fainter. She heard a shot from the valley. She looked pleased. Davy was a good boy.
The first house beyond the ruined village stood well back from the road, with a field behind it, and beyond that a straggling copse. It had been rebuilt sufficiently to give shelter. Smoke came from a stovepipe chimney.
They saw a woman running to seek refuge in the copse. Some warning she must have had, for she was already in flight when they came into view of the house.
The bay horse plunged, and the Captain kept his seat with difficulty. There was the report of a rifle.
The Captain saw a red mark on the horse’s counter, where the bullet had scored it. He was not lacking in courage. “Come on, men,” he shouted. They clattered down the road to the gate.
The man did not wait to fire again when he saw how his first shot was received. He ran out of the back of the house after the woman.
A stern word from the Captain checked the pursuit, which would have scattered his men to so inadequate a purpose.
“Forward,” he said, “and keep together. You know the orders.”
They went on down the road.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Among the minor insanities of the England that the floods had covered had been the production of motorcycles capable of moving on a smooth surface at such speeds as must obviously result in many deaths and injuries on its crowded highways. Such deaths and mutilations did occur in unregarded thousands, not only the riders themselves, but many innocent pedestrians being destroyed or maimed without effectual protest, in a country which was oppressed with countless laws, but was without intelligent government. The “vested interest” of those engaged in the production of these vehicles was alone sufficient to prevent any active intervention by governments which depended upon the corrupt financial support of the wealthier sections of the community, which were almost openly collected, and euphoniously described as “party funds.”
Instead, therefore, of suppressing a nuisance so murderous and so useless (for most of the riders of these vehicles were actuated simply by the desire to escape for a brief interval from the enforced monotony of the mechanical slavery in which they lived, and after rushing over the public roads would return abortively to the place from which they started) by the obvious method of preventing the manufacture of machines of a power and speed which could have no legitimate utility, a system was developed of fining those who committed various technical or other offences against an elaborate system of regulations of little practical value. The money so collected went to swell the huge funds controlled by a complicated system of local bureaucracies. It followed that any man could endanger the peace and safety of the community if he were prepared to pay for an uncertain proportion of these incident
s; that the public were quietened by the illusion that steps had been taken for their protection; and that the administrators of the official funds profited at the cost of their neighbours’ blood.
One of these machines had been owned by a friend of Davy Barnes, who had initiated him into the mysteries of its control, and had allowed him some practice in riding it—an occupation which was promptly vetoed by the good sense of his mother when it came to her vigilant ears. Her mind was little occupied by any consideration for the welfare of the community, but she pointed out that he could risk his life in the mine as much as any reasonable youth should desire, and that his earnings were of importance, not only to herself, but to the younger children.
Happy in the knowledge that he could now use one of these lethal instruments with his mother’s sanction on the cumbered highroad, Davy hurried to convey the warnings which she had enjoined upon him, and preceded to the acquisition of the only motor bicycle that remained in working order and supplied with the necessary fuel to incite its activities.
Ben Todd was absent; but Davy was not delayed by that circumstance. Had the privileges of friendship or the greatness of the emergency been insufficient to justify its abstraction, his mother’s orders would have been exoneration for a much greater delinquency.
Davy had a reputation for simplicity, but he was not a fool. He understood very clearly why he must take the side-road that his mother had indicated, and that haste was needed
He was not slow, having inherited much of the physical ability of his mother, but the petrol-tank had to be filled, and some adjustments made, before his machine was able to career, backfiring joyously, upon the public road.
To follow Tom by the direct way, he would have had to strike the main road, continue along it until he had passed the deserted village and his mother’s cottage, go on up the hill, and turn off to the left at the hilltop by the southern road which Tom had taken two days before, and by which Jerry had planned retreat.
To do this would have been to encounter Jerry’s force, with its natural consequences. His mother’s directions had provided, as far as possible, against this danger. Yet the highroad must be crossed, and for a short distance he must continue along it, before he would come to the side-lane he was seeking.
It followed that Jerry Cooper, riding at the head of the ten men who were still with him, and coming briskly round a bend of the road, observed a motorcyclist approaching at a quick wobble from the opposite direction
The cyclist could not have failed to observe so large a troop of horsemen before him, yet he came on unregardingly.
Jerry had a quick and practical mind. He saw the lane that turned south two hundred yards ahead, and guessed the cyclist’s objective. He saw that even though they should put their horses to the gallop, it was a race which they could not win. He gave a quick order to halt and fire.
The horsemen spread out across the road, each firing as quickly as he could come up clear of the men that had been riding before him. They fired from the saddle. The half-trained horses jibbed and flurried, and some confusion resulted
The shots came thickest as Davy approached the turning, making a wide curve to avoid the debris of a fallen wall. A bullet dinted the handle bar. Another struck the front wheel, and left a spoke projecting at right angles to its original purpose. A third rattled the petrol-tank. The machine bounded perilously over a brick-end, and disappeared round the comer. “A crowded hour of glorious life” might never come to Davy Barnes, but he had had half a minute. Half a minute of ecstasy. His broad face beamed with delight. There was nothing better that life could give until his mother’s fiat should deliver to his custody the waiting Sybil.
But Jerry Cooper sat the great bay, frowning. He knew already that the surprise had failed. Now Tom would be warned. He was a business man. He knew when to cut a loss. He did not think that Tom could be very near. He did not think that Davy would continue his erratic course very much further. He knew the state of the roads. There was time yet. He would like to carry off Tom’s household. They would be useful hostages, at the least. But he did not think that the need for hostages would arise. He did not wish to abandon the men he had sent to fetch them.
He was too coolheaded to defeat himself as some men will, but he changed his plans on the instant. It was no use thinking of attacking Tom now. Tom would be warned. He would not lose men and risk prestige in a useless skirmish. And he would draw his scattered force together at once. They would carry off what they could, and retreat by the direct road—the way they came.
He looked round at the disordered group that had pulled up behind him. He turned his horse.
“Fall in,” he said sharply. “It’s no picnic. We’re betrayed somehow. Look alive.”
He led the way back at a quick trot, and turned off at the road to Cowley Thorn. He would join the troop which he had sent that way a few minutes earlier.
An hour later, sitting prudently behind a bolted door, Martha heard the clatter of their retreat.
Jerry, riding ahead, looked doubtfully at the cottage. If he thought—but time was not to be wasted, and the door was closed. He had no proof.
Behind him came a double line of horsemen, variously laden. They did not lack spoil. But they had only three women, willing or unwilling. And two saddles were empty. There were white faces also, and bloodstained bandages among the troop. They had found the houses empty. They had beaten a wood or two. They had killed more than one man, including a wifeless individual whom they had discovered in a hammock in a weed-choked garden reading David Copperfield It was a silly murder, but yet the man may be envied. He had had three months of blissful life without work and without debts, and he died as the summer waned.
Jerry Cooper led the way up the hill. He halted on the top where the roads forked. The jockey should have been there by now, with Rentoul and Bryan. He hoped they had not failed. Rentoul had brains. So had the jockey. He looked back on an empty road. He did not think they would fail. They might have found it necessary to take another way. Rentoul knew the country. But he had said that he would wait here. He liked to teach the men that they could trust his word. And he liked to be obeyed.
For half an hour he kept the troop standing there in the heat of the afternoon sun. Now and then a horse pawed restlessly or a bridle jingled. Otherwise they sat silent and motionless.
Then he gave the order to ride forward. He knew when to cut a loss.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
The road to Cowley Thorn turned left from the main road, slanting somewhat backward and curving till it ran almost due west.
Further on, on the same side, but striking in a more northerly direction, was the road that had once led to the mansion of the Earl of Ellerton and to the village of Lower Hedford, which was now under water.
It was up this road that Joe and his two companions had turned their horses, under the guidance of Rentoul, who had scouted over the district during the summer nights until he knew his way better than most of those who had not lost their right to live there.
Among the men who had followed the lead of Jerry Cooper, he was, perhaps, the most decent. A love of adventure, a genuine admiration for a man who seemed stronger and more capable than those who opposed him, joined to a certain callousness of temperament, had led him to follow Jerry Cooper, and he was not of the kind to lightly admit an error or leave the side he had taken.
Riding now at a brisk pace, which had outdistanced the rest of the party (and cleared the main road too soon to encounter the approaching Davy), but not so as to tire their horses for the harder work which was before them, the three men fell into conversation upon the orders which they had undertaken.
Joe was anxious that the abduction should be carried out with sufficient speed to insure that they should not be left behind the retreat of their companions. He had a plan in his own mind, but before he proposed it he inquired as to the intentions of his companions.
Bryan, a coarse-featured man with a large wen under the left eye and the
general aspect of a stage assassin, thought that the presence of the children would make it easy. “She can’t run far with the kids, and it’s most like,” he said, “that she won’t leave them. If they’re indoors we shall have them out easy enough.”
Joe suggested that they might persuade them to come by quieter methods.
“It’s dirty work, anyway,” said Rentoul.
Bryan stared.
Joe said: “Tell her we’ve come from Tom, and she’ll go quiet.” He liked the easier way, and he knew that violence is almost always stupid.
They turned their horses into the byroad. So far they had seen neither man nor woman. A distant shot as they took the corner told them that the other troops were at work, and that some resistance was offered, but all seemed peaceful here.
Yet they had not gone a hundred yards along the narrower road when a shot came from the wooded roadside behind them. There was a high bank on the left along this road. It would have been a hopeless folly to dismount and search for their assailant. With a common impulse they quickened pace to get beyond range of the danger. Rentoul was lying forward as though to reduce the mark he might give for a second shot. They did not think that he might be wounded. But the chestnut mare he rode, who had known her rider’s way for two months of lonely scouting, was aware that something was wrong. She slackened pace and stopped at the roadside. He half slipped, half fell from the saddle. He reached a hand to his back and felt under the shoulder blade. It came back reddened.
His companions reined up for a moment, and then rode on.
“He’s out,” said Bryan.
Joe had no intention of risking delay for a wounded-man. He had a practical mind. “There’ll be two for one of us to manage,” he said. “You better take the kids.”
Bryan did not reply.
The chestnut mare stood by her master, puzzled and nervous, but she did not offer to leave him, though the smell of blood frightened her as she breathed over the prostrate body. After a time she began to feed at the roadside.
Deluge: A Novel of Global Warming Page 28
