"Think I care? Damn you, too, and I'll fight you when we meet again. Like a lark! Wish I'd time now. Good day, sir!" He dug the rowels into his horse and was off. An earnest, choleric man with his heart in his work, for which I liked him, even to his persistent damning. I put Sultan to the slope and he kept bravely at it till I eased him off where the rise was steepest. My late encounter clearly meant that affairs were ripening fast farther north, and it might also mean danger behind me sooner than I had looked for. The blood danced in my veins at the prospect of the adventures that awaited me. Ho, for life and work! Would it be long before the blue eyes lanced me through and through again, as when I kissed her hand among the trees by the roadside? I looked at the frosty sun and judged that it was nigh on twenty-four hours since I had stood in the porch and watched mother and Kate across the cobbles into the road--twenty-four hours that had done more for me than the twenty-four years that had gone before them, for they had given me a man's task, a man's thoughts, the stirrings of a man's being, the beginning of a man's agony. We were at the top now with the open country stretching for miles around us. But the dale beneath, through which the main road ran a mile away to the east, was thick with trees, and I could get no inkling of how things were going. I strained my ears to listen, but no warning sound could I hear. The countryside was still and calm as a frozen sea, and war and its terrors seemed so impossible that for a moment I felt as if it was only a dream-life that I was living and that I must wake soon and hear Joe Braggs trolling out his morning song in honour of Jane. But Sultan craned round his shapely head as if to ask me why I was loitering in the cold, bleak air; so with a cheery slap on his glossy neck, I gave him the reins and away he went, with me spitting ghostly Broctons on the sergeant's tuck. Through the skirts of the woodland he carried me, and then up again till on the top of Clayton Bank I pulled him up a second time for another survey of the situation. The little town was now in full view a mile ahead, lying on the slope and top of some rising ground. Across the meadows to my right, and now plainly to be seen less than half a mile away, was the main road from Stone. Again I was disappointed. A long, rude post-wagon, pulled by eight horses and driven by a man on an active little nag, was groaning its way south; a solitary horseman was ambling north--and that was all I could see. What had happened to the Colonel? Were the dragoons in the town or not? I dug my heels into Sultan's flanks and put him to it at his best, and in a few minutes was on the outskirts of the town.