There is not a hind in my employ who will enter his stall. Ill
fare the day that ever I took the beast from the Castle stud at
Guildford, where they could do nothing with it and no rider could
be found bold enough to mount it! When the sacrist here took it
for a fifty-shilling debt he made his own bargain and must abide
by it. He comes no more to the Crooksbury farm."
"And he stays no more here," said the Abbot. "Brother sacrist,
you have raised the Devil, and it is for you to lay it again."
"That I will most readily," cried the sacrist. "The pittance-
master can stop the fifty shillings from my very own weekly dole,
and so the Abbey be none the poorer. In the meantime here is Wat
with his arbalist and a bolt in his girdle. Let him drive it to
the head through this cursed creature, for his hide and his hoofs
are of more value than his wicked self."
A hard brown old woodman who had been shooting vermin in the Abbey
groves stepped forward with a grin of pleasure. After a lifetime
of stoats and foxes, this was indeed a noble quarry which was to
fall before him. Fitting a bolt on the nut of his taut crossbow,
he had raised it to his shoulder and leveled it at the fierce,
proud, disheveled head which tossed in savage freedom at the other
side of the wall. His finger was crooked on the spring, when a
blow from a whip struck the bow upward and the bolt flew harmless
over the Abbey orchard, while the woodman shrank abashed from
Nigel Loring's angry eyes.
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