The White Company Chapter 10 - How Hordle John Found a Man Whom He Might Follow

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:24)
CHAPTER X How Hordle John Found a Man Whom He Might Follow If he might not return to Bully within the year, and if his brother's dogs were to be set upon him if he showed his face upon minstead land, then indeed he was adrift upon earth. North, south, east and west, he might turn where he would, but all was equally chill and cheerless.
The abbot had rolled ten silver crowns in a lettuce leaf and hid them away in the bottom of his scrip, but that would be a sorry support for twelve long months.
In all the darkness there was but the one bright spot of the sturdy comrades who he had left that morning. If he could find them again all would be well. The afternoon was not very advanced, for all that had befallen him. When a man is afoot at Cockrow much may be done in the day. If he walked fast he might yet overtake his friends ere they reached their destination. He pushed on, therefore, now walking and now running. As he journeyed he bit into a crust which remained from his bully bread, and he washed it down by a draught from a woodland stream. It was no easy or light thing to journey through this great forest, which was some twenty miles from east to west, and a good sixteen from Bramshaw Woods in the north to Limington in the south. Alleyne, however, had the good fortune to fall in with a woodman, axe upon shoulder, trudging along in the very direction that he wished to go.
With his guidance he passed the fringe of Baldwood Walk, famous for old ash and yew, through Markash with its giant beech trees, and on through Knightwood Groves, where the giant oak was already a great tree, but only one of many cummily brothers. They plodded along together, the woodman and Alleyne, with little talk on either side, for their thoughts were as far asunder as the poles.
The peasant's gossip had been of the hunt, of the bracken, of the grey-headed kites that had nested at Woodfidley, and of the great catch of herring brought back by the boats of Pits Deep. The clerk's mind was on his brother, on his future. Above all, on this strange, fierce, melting, beautiful woman who had broken so suddenly into his life, and has suddenly passed out of it again. So distraught was he, and so random his answers, that the woodman took to whistling, and soon branched off upon the track to Burleigh, leaving Allen upon the main Christchurch road.
Down this he pushed as fast he might, hoping at every turn and rise to catch sight of his companions of the morning. From Vinny Ridge to Rhinefield Walk, the woods grow thick and dense up to the very edges of the track. But beyond, the country opens up into broad, dun-colored moors, flecked with clumps of trees and topping each other in long low curves up to the dark lines of forest in the furthest distance.
Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the songbirds. Long glinting dragonflies shot across the path or hung, tremulous, with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies. Once a white-necked sea-eagle soared screaming high over the traveller's head, and again a flock of brown busters popped up from among the bracken and blundered away in their clumsy fashion, half running, half flying, with strident cry and whir of wings.
There were folk, too, to be met upon the road, beggars and curious, chapmen and tinkers, cheery fellows for the most part, with a rough jest and homely greeting for each other and for Alleyne. Near Shotwood he came upon five seamen, on their way from Poole to Southampton, rude, red-faced men, who shouted at him in the jargon which he could scarce understand, and held out to him a great pot from which they had been drinking, nor would they let him pass until he had dipped Panekin in and taken a mouthful, which set him coughing and choking with the tears running down his cheeks.
Further on he met a sturdy black-bearded man mounted on a brown horse, with a rosary in his right hand and his long two-handed sword jangling against his stirrup iron. By his black robe and his eight-pointed cross upon his sleeve, Alleyne recognized him as one of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, whose presbytery was at Badersley. He held up two fingers as he passed with a Benedict Phili-Mee, whereat Alleyne doffed hat and bent knee, looking with much reverence at one who had devoted his life to the overthrow of the infidel. Poor simple lad! He had not learned yet that what men are, and what men profess to be, are very wide asunder, and that the knights of St. John, having come into large part of the riches of the ill-fated Templars, were very much too comfortable to think of exchanging their palace for a tent, or the cellars of England for the thirsty deserts of Syria.