Long
he sat in silence, bending a little in the saddle, as if worn out with
fatigue, though he had ridden only three hours since daybreak.
"Sir," said his man Dunstan, interrupting his master's meditations,
"here is an inn, and we may find water for our horses."
Gilbert looked up indifferently, and then, as there was no near
building in sight, he turned inquiringly to his man. A sardonic smile
played on Dunstan's lean dark face as he pointed to what Gilbert had
taken for three haystacks. They were, indeed, nothing but conical straw
huts standing a few steps aside from the road, thirty yards down the
hill. The entrance to each was low and dark, and from the one issued
wreaths of blue smoke, slowly rising in the still, cold air. At the
same entrance a withered bough proclaimed that wine was to be had. A
ditch beyond the furthest hut was full of water, and at some distance
from it a rude shed of boughs had been set up to afford the horses of
travellers some shelter from winter rain or summer sun. As Gilbert
looked, a man came out, bowing himself almost double to pass under the
low aperture. He wore long goatskin breeches and a brown homespun
tunic, like a monk's frock, cut short above the knees, and girdled with
a twisted thong. Shaggy black hair thatched his square head, and a thin
black beard framed the yellow face, which had the fever-stricken look
of the dwellers in the Campagna.
Though this was the first halting-place of the kind to which Gilbert
had come in the Roman plain, he was no longer easily surprised by
anything, and he did not even smile as he rode forward and dismounted.
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