Close at his heels came three laborers walking abreast, with
spade and mattock over their shoulders. They sang some rude
chorus right tunefully as they walked, but their English was so
coarse and rough that to the ears of a cloister-bred man it
sounded like a foreign and barbarous tongue. One of them carried
a young bittern which they had caught upon the moor, and they
offered it to Alleyne for a silver groat. Very glad he was to
get safely past them, for, with their bristling red beards and
their fierce blue eyes, they were uneasy men to bargain with upon
a lonely moor.

Yet it is not always the burliest and the wildest who are the
most to be dreaded. The workers looked hungrily at him, and then
jogged onwards upon their way in slow, lumbering Saxon style. A
worse man to deal with was a wooden-legged cripple who came
hobbling down the path, so weak and so old to all appearance that
a child need not stand in fear of him. Yet when Alleyne had
passed him, of a sudden, out of pure devilment, he screamed out a
curse at him, and sent a jagged flint stone hurtling past his
ear. So horrid was the causeless rage of the crooked creature,
that the clerk came over a cold thrill, and took to his heels
until he was out of shot from stone or word. It seemed to him
that in this country of England there was no protection for a man
save that which lay in the strength of his own arm and the speed
of his own foot. In the cloisters he had heard vague talk of the
law--the mighty law which was higher than prelate or baron, yet
no sign could he see of it. What was the benefit of a law
written fair upon parchment, he wondered, if there were no
officers to enforce it. As it fell out, however, he had that
very evening, ere the sun had set, a chance of seeing how stern