At that moment a clear voice came up from the street.  Richard listened an instant and then opened the casement.

“De Lacy,” he called, “come hither. . .  I want you,” he said when the young Knight entered, wrapped in his long cloak, “with all possible secrecy, to secure all the doors of the inn and bring the keys to me.  At any that cannot be locked, post two of my personal retainers with orders to permit no one to depart the place.  That done, take fifty men and station them along the road to where it joins the Roman highway this side the Ouse.  Bid them allow no one to travel southward ere sunrise without express authority from me.  Act instantly.”

IX

THE ARREST

De Lacy found the landlord dozing beside the chimney in the kitchen.  The fire was still smouldering on the hearth, and the big black kettle gave forth an odor of garlic and vegetables that made the air most foul.  On the floor, in promiscuous confusion, lay various members of the establishment, of both sexes, who never even stirred at the Knight’s entrance, either because they were too deep in sleep to hear him or too tired to care if they were trodden upon.  Arousing the host, Aymer demanded all the keys of the inn, in the name of the Duke of Gloucester, and before the half-dazed fellow could respond he seized the big bunch that hung at his girdle and snapped it free.  Bidding him mind his own business and go to sleep, he proceeded to execute his orders; and then hastened to the house where, by accident, that evening he had noticed Raynor Royk was quartered.

Twenty minutes later he rode out of Northampton and crossed the Nene with the fifty retainers behind him.  To Dauvrey and Raynor Royk, he repeated the Duke’s order just as it had been given, deeming it well, if he were incapacitated, that those next in command should know what to do.  Leaving five men on the south bank of the Nene, he dropped bands of four at regular intervals along the road, with instructions to patrol constantly the intervening distances on both sides of them.  The remaining five men he posted at the Roman highway, with orders not to separate under any circumstances.

Leaving Raynor in charge of this detail, De Lacy and his squire jogged slowly back toward Northampton.  Hanging in an almost cloudless sky, the full moon was lighting up with its brilliant uncertainty the country around.  The intense calm of the early morning was upon the earth, and there was no sound but the tramp of their horses, varied, at intervals, by the approach of one of the patrols or the passing of a sentry post.

About midway to the Nene the squire’s horse picked a stone.  It stuck persistently, and he swore at it under his breath as he tried to free it.  Presently it yielded, and he had raised his arm to hurl it far away when a sharp word from De Lacy arrested him.  They had chanced to halt in the shadow of a bit of woodland which, at that point, fringed the east side of the road.  To the left, for some distance, the ground was comparatively clear of timber, and crossing this open space, about a hundred yards away, were two horsemen.  They were riding at a rapid trot, but over the soft turf they made no sound.