The soldiers trailed out by the door leading to the interior.  Mr. Blood was thrust by his guards into the courtyard, where Pitt and Baynes already waited.  From the threshold of the hall, he looked back at Captain Hobart, and his sapphire eyes were blazing.  On his lips trembled a threat of what he would do to Hobart if he should happen to survive this business.  Betimes he remembered that to utter it were probably to extinguish his chance of living to execute it.  For to-day the King’s men were masters in the West, and the West was regarded as enemy country, to be subjected to the worst horror of war by the victorious side.  Here a captain of horse was for the moment lord of life and death.

Under the apple-trees in the orchard Mr. Blood and his companions in misfortune were made fast each to a trooper’s stirrup leather.  Then at the sharp order of the cornet, the little troop started for Bridgewater.  As they set out there was the fullest confirmation of Mr. Blood’s hideous assumption that to the dragoons this was a conquered enemy country.  There were sounds of rending timbers, of furniture smashed and overthrown, the shouts and laughter of brutal men, to announce that this hunt for rebels was no more than a pretext for pillage and destruction.  Finally above all other sounds came the piercing screams of a woman in acutest agony.

Baynes checked in his stride, and swung round writhing, his face ashen.  As a consequence he was jerked from his feet by the rope that attached him to the stirrup leather, and he was dragged helplessly a yard or two before the trooper reined in, cursing him foully, and striking him with the flat of his sword.

It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man — as he had long suspected — was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated.

CHAPTER III

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE

It was not until two months later — on the 19th of September, if you must have the actual date — that Peter Blood was brought to trial, upon a charge of high treason.  We know that he was not guilty of this; but we need not doubt that he was quite capable of it by the time he was indicted.  Those two months of inhuman, unspeakable imprisonment had moved his mind to a cold and deadly hatred of King James and his representatives.  It says something for his fortitude that in all the circumstances he should still have had a mind at all.  Yet, terrible as was the position of this entirely innocent man, he had cause for thankfulness on two counts.  The first of these was that he should have been brought to trial at all; the second, that his trial took place on the date named, and not a day earlier.  In the very delay which exacerbated him lay — although he did not realize it — his only chance of avoiding the gallows.