“Ready!” shouted Nicky. Thirty fists came up with rocks poised — though the pudgy arms at the center scarcely rose above the wheat stalks. Out of the wheat a naked man bounded like a startled deer. He gazed wild-eyed at the children for a moment; then, amid whoops and jeers, he was scampering up the hill. Nicky called her army into line of march again. That must have been the man she first saw escaping across the lawn in the gray, chill air before sunrise. She looked to her left and was astounded to see that the sun had still not crossed the low hilltop, though the air was gold with its coming. Less than an hour ago, then, the attack had begun.
Her guide led them slantwise up to a second gate, beyond which was a pasture full of cows who stared at them in stolid boredom as they trooped across. The cries from the house were faint and few now, but a strange mutter seemed to be growing in the village. The next gate led into a lane, all arched over with hazels, which her guide wanted to turn along;
but Nicky thought they were still dangerously close to the big house and insisted on pushing through the fields behind the straggle of cottages that ran down the main road to the Borough.
More pasture here, and they had to skirt around a marshy piece where the stream that flowed through the White House gardens rose. The mutter from the village was like the roar of surf, and above it floated indistinguishable human shouts. Looking to her right as they slanted down towards the uproar, Nicky saw a slow column of smoke billowing up into the blissful morning. She realized what had happened.
“Run!” she cried. “Run, but keep together!”
If they didn’t reach the road in time, a hundred maddened villagers would be roaring down to the big house to slaughter every living thing there, Sikh or robber. It was no use reaching the road alone — she had to come with all the children, safe. The villagers had seen the smoke from the stables and decided that the robbers had fired the barn where their hostages lay. And it would be the Sikhs’ fault.
The line moved down hill, slowed to the pace of exhausted and ill-fed six-year-olds stumbling through the tussocks.
“You three,” gasped Nicky to the older ones nearest her, “run to the road. Try to stop the village from attacking my friends. Tell them all the children are safe.”
The messengers went down the slope in a happy freewheeling gallop, as if it had been a game for a summer evening. Nicky grabbed the wrists of the two smallest children and half helped, half hauled them over the hummocky turf. Other children dropped their flints and copied her. And here was a path, a narrow channel between the wall of a chapel and the fence of a pub garden, and now they were in the road, gasping, while the three messengers shrank from the roaring tide of the enraged village as it poured down the road toward them, led by little old Maxie waving a carpenter’s hammer. The men were yelling, but the women were silent, and they were more terrible stilclass="underline" marching in their snowy aprons, faces drawn into gray lines with rage and weeping, fingers clenched round the handles of carving knives and cleavers.
Terrified by the sight, Nicky’s army melted to the walls of the road. She stood helpless in the middle, still gripping the fat wrists of the two small children.
The tide of vengeance tried to halt, but the villagers at the back, who could not see what had happened, jostled into the ones who could. The news spread like flame through dry hay. The roaring anger changed and became a great hoarse splendor of cheering and relief. Mother after mother dropped her weapon and ran forward, arms outstretched. They came in a white whirl, like doves homing to the dovecote, and knelt in the road to hug their children.
Nicky ran to Maxie.
“Can you get the men to come and help my friends?” she cried. “They’ve killed half the robbers, but they’re still fighting.”
Maxie looked round at the bellowing crowd and nodded.
“Lift me up, Dave,” he crowed to the stout man beside him.
Dave and another man swung him up to their shoulders as if he’d been a child held high to watch a king come past. He raised his arms like Moses on the mount and waited for the cheering to die.
“Men o’ Felpham,” he crowed. “You know as the Devil’s Children have rescued our childer out of the hands of the robbers. Now they’re fighting them to the death down at White House. Do we go help them?”
A mutter of doubt ran through the crowd.
“We’ve taken the horses,” cried Nicky. “Look, I’ve brought one. And we’ve burned the place where the armor was, and we’ve killed half the robbers. We’ve killed the worst of the horsemen.”
The mutter changed its note, and rose.
“Do we go help them?” crowed Maxie again. “Or do we let it be said that the men o’ Felpham stood and watched while a handful of strangers did their fighting for them?”
The mutter returned to the note that Nicky had first heard, the noise of surf in a gale.
“Okay, Dave,” said Maxie, “you can put me down.”
The women pulled their children aside to let the bellowing army pass. Nicky picked up a fallen cleaver and walked beside Maxie.
“Five of my grandchilder there,” he said. “You go home now, girl. This is no business for a child.”
“I'm coming to make sure you don’t hurt my friends,” she said.
“Shan’t do that. Not now.”
“Well, I’m coming anyway.”
Maxie looked over his shoulder.
“Hey!” he crowed. “You get off that horse, Dave Gracey, and let the girl ride. She’ll be safer up there.”
The stout man slid down, grinning, and whisked Nicky up to the broad and cushiony back. She had ridden ponies on holidays, sometimes, but never a creature as tall as this, never bareback and without reins, though Dave Gracey still held the halter. She seemed a mile in the air, and clutched the coarse mane with her left hand.
But after minute she found that she wasn't afraid of the height, because the back was so broad and the horse’s movement, at this pace, so steady, that she might have been riding on a palanquin. She let go of the mane, rested the cruel cleaver across her lap, straightened her back and neck and rode like a queen.
The exultation of victory thrilled through her blood. They had nearly done it now. All through the long night stalk, and the taut waiting, and the short blind blaze of action, she had felt nothing. She had simply thought and acted as the minute demanded. Even fear (and she had been horribly afraid) came from outside, pulsed through her, and was gone. But now she thought “We have nearly done it.” Glory washed over her like sunrise.
Now she knew why the robber knight had laughed like a lover as he clove at the tarred planks. The same glory was in him; but in him it had gone rancid.
It was a good half mile from the Borough to the White House. The village bellowed its coming all the way.
The besieged robbers must have heard them, realized that flight was the only hope now and made a desperate sortie. For as the village turned into the White House drive they met a dozen of their oppressors. Beyond, on the far side of a little bridge, came the weary Sikhs.
The village halted, faced by these armed and pitiless enemies. Another second and their courage might have oozed away as fast as it had risen; but Nicky kicked as hard as she could at the horse’s sides, swung her cleaver up and shouted “Come on!”
The great beast trundled forward and the roaring rose behind her once again. A robber lunged at her with a short lance, but she saw the stroke coming and bashed the point aside with the flat of her cleaver. Another man fell as the horse simply breasted him over. The second rank of robbers turned to run back over the bridge. But there on the other side, swords ready, waited the grim Sikhs. The robbers hesitated, and the village churned over them.