her, about this terrible
beast who still gazes and snorts at us over the top of the wall as
though his thoughts of Holy Church were as uncouth as those of Squire
Nigel himself, what are we to do with him?"

"Here is Franklin Aylward," said one of the brethren. "The horse was
his, and doubtless he will take it back to his farm."

But the stout red-faced farmer shook his head at the proposal. "Not I,
in faith!" said he. "The beast hath chased me twice round the paddock;
it has nigh slain my boy Samkin. He would never be happy till he had
ridden it, nor has he ever been happy since. 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.

"Keep your bolts for your weasels!" said he. "Would you take life from a
creature whose only fault is that its spirit is so high that it has
met none yet who dare control it? You would slay such a horse as a king
might be proud to mount, and all because a country franklin, or a monk,
or a monk's varlet, has not the wit nor the hands to master him?"

The sacrist turned swiftly on the Squire. "