I stumbled into a corner and sat huddled up, straining my eyes ahead to catch what was to come. Margaret's information was clearly correct. We took the road north, passed through Penrith without a halt, and out again, still on the turnpike, proof that Carlisle was to be our destination. The city was obviously now in the Duke's power. Mile after mile we covered apace, and at every curve and cross-road I peered ahead and around with my heart in my mouth. One point in my favour was the desolate nature of the country, exactly fitted for such a stratagem as was in hand. On the right the gloomy sky was blotted out by jagged masses of gloomier hills. On the left the country varied between flat and upland, but was hardly less uninviting. "Where d'ye think y're going?" asked the sergeant, joggling me with his spurred heel to make me look at him. "No idea," said I. "Blast ye. I wish y'had," he growled viciously, and I turned away to smile. We passed through a village littered with the Duke's baggage wagons and pretty full of soldiery. This chilled my spirit somewhat, for it looked as if we were about to run into the rear of the Royal army. Outside the village, however, we again had the road to ourselves, and a mile farther on dropped to a walk to climb a long slant of road. Whenever the road curved my way I had seen the corporal and his two men riding from fifty to a hundred yards ahead of us. Not very far up the slope we came on a farmstead lying flush on the roadside. In the yard were some thirty head of shaggy black cattle, of the northern kind seldom seen in our parts and therefore attractive to a farmer's eye. A farm-hand leaning over the gate had some noisy gossip with the dragoons as they passed, and bawled his news to a group of men sitting at meat under a hovel. It was a poor enough place to support so many men, for the farm-wife, who came to her kitchen door to see what the clatter was about, was of no better seeming than a yokel's wife with us. My eyes were on her curiously when the man on the gate skipped off and flung it open right across the muzzles of our horses. In the tick of a clock the whole scene changed. The men under the hovel rushed out, fell on the cattle, thrashed them mercilessly with great battoons, yelled at them like maniacs, and drove them in a shoving, bellowing, maddened mass into the road, which here had a stone wall on the side opposite the farm. When the torrent was fairly going, two of the supposed yokels snatched up carbines, climbed on to the hovel, and opened fire on the dragoons in our rear.