While Butler and his officers shouted and smashed glasses below stairs, and the men in their turn let discipline slip, Hugh, in the hope of getting some tidings of his Oldesworth kindred, bribed his way in to speak with the Roundhead prisoner. The man was defiant at first, then more communicative when Hugh smuggled him in some bread and meat, but, being of a Northamptonshire regiment, he could give little of the information Hugh sought, save that he had heard of Captain Thomas Oldesworth and had had speech with Hugh’s other uncle, Lieutenant David Millington, who was in garrison with his company of foot at Newick in Warwickshire. For his Roundhead kinsfolk’s sake Hugh lent the lieutenant a coat, and, when Butler, in a shaky, white state of sobriety, packed him off under guard to prison at Oxford, gave five shillings to the corporal who had charge of the squad, and urged him to use the prisoner as civilly as he could. Considering the temper of the squad, however, and the fact that his old acquaintance, the surly Garrett, was one of them, Hugh decided those five shillings had probably been expended for nothing. Near a week later the men came back, and, in his joy at any new sight in his monotonous life, Hugh turned out to meet them. He counted them idly, as they came pacing in at the gate, till his eyes fell upon a horse that Garrett led, a bay horse, all saddled, which put up its head and whickered. “Bayard!” Hugh cried, plunging into the press, and, getting the horse clear, fair put his arms about its neck in the face of the whole garrison. “Where did you find him?” he questioned Garrett a moment later, sharply, to preserve his dignity. The man explained they had come home by a way that took them near Ashcroft, for he held there might be letters Master Burley would gladly pay a price for, and there they had found both a letter and the horse, which had been waiting him some days. Hugh paid generously, the more so as he saw the letter was directed in Dick’s black hand; that made the sending of Bayard no longer a mystery, for doubtless Dick would have him come northward now and so had sent him the horse. He could hardly wait to see the beast stabled before he ran up to the chamber he shared with Allestree, and tore open the letter that should summon him. Then he read:— SWEET FRIEND: