thinking that mayhap I might not be welcome any longer in the army of France, I e'en came my ways after you. As I rode I cast my uniform and left my commission in the pocket of my coat. So I am but poor masterless Jack Scarlett once more – a free comrade looking for a regiment, and equipped with nothing but his thews and his long sword, which, God be thanked, are both his own. Think ye the States-General and the Yellow Prince have need of such as I?"
"And how now about the anointed king?" Wat could not help saying.
"The anointed king is safe in Whitehall, and can afford to wait till Jack Scarlett is a little less hungry," answered the free-lance, frankly.
Having been thus fortunate in obtaining the only two good horses about the inn of Brederode (for the Frenchmen had come by sea to the little port of Lis-op-Zee, and the horses of the Calf and the Killer were but sorry jades), Scarlett had ridden all the way back without a challenge, or so much as encountering any sound more threatening than the roopy chuckle of disturbed poultry on the farm-house roosts as he clattered by on his way.
As the two horsemen came nearer to the city, and the east began to send up a fountain of rosy hues to mingle with the gray spaces of the early morning, Wat could not help laughing at the figure his comrade presented. The master-at-arms was attired simply and Spartanly in such darned and patched underclothing as he had amassed during half a dozen campaigns. These were not all of the same material nor color. They were not, indeed, at all points strictly continuous, the native hide being allowed to show itself through here and there, while only the long sword belted about the waist and the cavalry boots remained to tell of the well-seasoned man of wars and stratagems.
Jack Scarlett was noways offended at Wat's frank laughter. He even glanced down at himself with a comically rueful air.
"I wish to the saints that I had met somebody else in this garb," he said; "and then I own I could have laughed myself off my horse."
But, nevertheless, laugh he did, and that most heartily, like a good-humored carle, at the figure of sin he cut in the morning light; and specially he was delighted at the paralyzed astonishment of a lank, hobbledehoy gooseherd who came trolloping along a path towards a canal bridge, yawning so that his lower jaw and his head well-nigh dropped apart. For at sight of the red-bearded man in the white sacking and top-boots the wand-twirling yokel gave a yell sudden as the popping of a cork, and forthwith fled, running fleet-foot along the edge of the canal as though the devil himself had been tattering at his tail.
"This guiser's mode will never do to enter the city of Amersfort withal!" quoth Scarlett, looking down at his own inconsequent ragamuffin swathings.
And he paused to consider the problem, while Wat divided himself between chuckling at his late enemy's dilemma, thinking what he would say in his coming interview with Barra in the camp, and (what occupied nine out of every ten minutes) wondering how Kate McGhie would receive him in the street of Zaandpoort.
At last the man in the white bandagings had an idea. He clapped his hand suddenly to his brow.
"What a dull dotard am I to forget Sandy Lyall!"
"I know," he continued in explanation, "a certain honest fool of a Scot that hath wedded a wife of the country. He lives but a mile from here and breeds young Flamands for the prince's armies, and ducks for the Amersfort market. We will e'en go find him, and make him deliver of the best in his wardrobe. For he and I count kin in some seventeenth or eighteenth degree, though this is the first time I ever bethought me of claiming it."
And with no more words John Scarlett turned his horse briskly down a side lane, just as the sun was rising and beginning to shine ruddily brown through the morning haze. The sails of a score of windmills darted up suddenly black in the level rush of light, and every hissing goose and waddling, matronly hen had a rosy side and a gray side, together with an attenuated shadow which stretched up the dikes and away across the polders.
Presently Scarlett and his companion, at the foot of a leafy by-lane, came to the house of the Scot who had married the Flemish wife for the very practical purposes described by Scarlett.
The madcap figure in white went forward to the door, while Wat remained behind cackling helplessly with idiot laughter. Scarlett thundered on the warped and sun-whitened deal of the panels with the hilt of his sword. Then, receiving no response, he kicked lustily with his boots and swore roundly at the unseen occupants in a dozen camp dialects.
During his harangues, sulky maledictions grumbled intermittently from the house. Presently an upper window flew open, a splash of dirty water fell souse on the warrior, and still more sadly bedraggled the preposterous quixotry of his attire.
The temper of the master-at-arms was now strained to the breaking-point. "Sandy Lyall," he cried – and to do him justice, his voice was more full of sorrow than of anger – "Sandy Lyall, of Pittenweem, listen to me, John Scarlett, gin ye dinna come doon this minute and get me a suit o' claes, warm and dry, I'll thraw your dirty Fifish neck – aye, like a twist of rotten straw at a rick-thatching."
But even this explicit malediction threatened to go by without effect.
But at long and last there looked out of the small diamond-paned window from which the jar of water had fallen the head of a respectable enough woman, who wore a red shawl wrapped round her coarse black hair in the fashion of a nightcap.
"Decent woman," cried Jack Scarlett to her, "is your man at hame?"
But the woman, feather-bed sleep yet blinking heavily in her eyes, threw up her hands and shrieked aloud at the unexpected apparition of a man thus mountebanking before her window in white and incomplete skin-tights.
Without articulate speech she withdrew her head and fled within. Whereat Scarlett fell to louder knocking than before, exclaiming all the while on the idleness, incapacity, and general uselessness of such men of Fife as had married foreigneering sluts, and especially threatening what he would do to the particular body and soul of Sandy Lyall, sometime indweller in the ancient borough of Pittenweem.
"Never did I see such a man. The ill-faured wife o' him settin' her head out o' a winnock-sole at five in the morning, and Sandy himsel' lyin' snorkin' an' wamblin' in his naked bed like a gussy swine in a stye! Lord, Lord, wait till I get my hands on him! I'll learn him to keep honester men than himsel' waitin' on the loan of his Sabbath gear, crawling partan o' the East Neuk that he is!"
"Aye, John Scarlett, man, but is that you, na?" drawled a quiet, sleepy voice at the window. "Wha wad hae thocht on seeing you in mountebank's cleading so early in the morning? Hae ye been at some play-actin' near by? Ye dinna look as if you had gotten muckle for your pains. Come awa ben, and I'll gar the wife rise an' get ye porridge – siclike porridge as ane can get in this Guid-forsaken country, that is mair like hen-meat than decent brose for Scots thrapples, to my thinkin'!"
"Sandy Lyall!" cried Scarlett, still much incensed, "hear to me! Come down this instant and let me in! Gi'e me a pair o' trews, a coat, and a decent cloak, and let me be gaun, for I am on an errand of great importance which takes me before the Prince of Orange himsel' this very morning, and it befits not a Scot and a soldier to appear before his high mightiness in this costume."
"I'll come doon the noo, as fast as I can don my gear and truss my points!" cried Sandy Lyall. "Ye were aye a rude man and unceevil a' the days o' ye, John Scarlett. But I canna leave ony Scots lad to want for a pair o' breeks and a cloak to cover his nakedness – or what amounts to the same thing, as the monkey said when he sat down on the hot girdle and gat up again before he was fairly rested."
And with these words, Sandy Lyall, of Pittenweem, in the shire of Fife, slowly descended, his feet sounding portentously on the wooden ladder. The door opened, and there was the master of the dwelling standing with outstretched hand, bidding his compatriots welcome to his house. The action would have disarmed a Cossack of Russia. It quenched the anger of John Scarlett like magic.
"Aye, man, an' hoo's a' wi' ye?" he said, as it is the custom for all Scots to say when they forgather with one another in any land under the sun.
After turning out of one drawer and another various articles of his wife's attire, which were clearly not intended (as Sandy remarked) "for breeks to a grown man like John Scarlett," the master of the house at last managed to array his friend