It was not his fault, nor his horse’s, that they came heedlessly to a corner of the road where it dipped down a greasy, curving slope. In the minds of both there was the need for haste, and they were riding straight, the two of them. His fiddle-headed beast slipped at the turning of the corner, reeled half across the road in his effort to recover, and threw his rider. When Rupert next awoke to knowledge of what was going forward he found himself alone. Far down the road he could hear the rattle of his horse as it galloped madly after its brethren that carried Sir Jasper’s company. Sir Jasper, meanwhile, had got to Langton High Street, had drawn his men up on either side of the road. Their horses were muddied to the girths. The riders were wet to the skin, splashed and unheroic. Yet from the crowd that had gathered from the rookeries and the by-streets of the town--a crowd not any way disposed to reverence the call of a Stuart to his loyal friends--a murmur of applause went up. They had looked for dainty gentlemen, playing at heroics while the poor ground at the mill named “daily bread.” They saw instead a company of horse whose members were not insolent, or gay, or free from weariness. They saw working farmers, known to them by sight, who were not accounted fools on market-days. Some glimmering of intelligence came to these townsfolk who led bitter lives among the by-streets. There must be “some queer mak’ o’ sense about it,” they grumbled one to another, as they saw that the Loyal Meet was wet to the skin, and grave and resolute. It was the like resolution--dumb, and without help from loyalty to a high Cause--that had kept many of them faithful to their wives, their children, their houses in the back alleys of Langton Town. The rain ceased for a while, and the sun came struggling through a press of clouds. And up through the middle of the street, between the two lines of horsemen and the chattering crowd behind, a single figure walked. He was big in length and beam, and he moved as if he owned the lives of men; and the shrill wind blew his cassock round him. Sir Jasper moved his horse into the middle of the street, stooped, and grasped the vicar’s hand. “We’re well met, I think,” he said. “What’s your errand, Vicar?” “Oh, just to ring the church bells. My ringer is a George’s man--so’s my sexton; and I said to both of them, in a plain parson’s way, that I’d need shriving if Langton, one way or t’other, didn’t ring a Stuart through the town. I can handle one bell, if not the whole team of six.” Sir Jasper laughed. So did his friends. So did the rabble looking on. “It’s well we’re here to guard you,” said Sir Jasper, glancing at the crowd, whose aspect did not promise well for church bells and such temperate plain-song.