CHAPTER IV.

LOUIS did not submit readily to his captors. At first he was angry; then he cried, and when some of the men laughed at him for being a baby he got angry again, and told them they were a band of cowards to set upon him in this way,—a dozen men on one boy,—and that if they wanted to rob him they might do it and go about their business. He did not care; he could walk home.

"No, no, my valiant page," said the leader of the robbers; "we don't want you to walk and we don't want you to go home. We shall take you with us now, and we will see about the robbing afterward."

And with this he turned the little horse around, and led him, by a path which Louis had passed without noticing it, into the depths of the forest. On the way, the robber asked his young prisoner a great many questions regarding his family, his connections, and his present business in riding thus alone through the forest roads. To these questions Louis was ready enough to give answer, for it was not his nature to conceal anything, unless he thought it absolutely necessary. Indeed, he was quite proud of the opportunity thus afforded him of talking about the rank and importance of his mother, and of dwelling upon the great power and warlike renown of the nobleman under whom he served.

"They will not let me stay here long, you may be sure of that," said Louis. "As soon as they hear that you have carried me off, they will take me away from you."

"I hope so, indeed," said the robber, laughing; "and if I had not thought that they would take you from me, I should not have taken the trouble to capture you."

"Oh, I know what you mean," said the boy. "You expect them to ransom me."

"I most certainly do," replied the other.

"But they will not do it," cried Louis. "They will come with soldiers and take me from you!"

"We shall see," returned the robber.

It was almost dark when, by many winding and sometimes almost invisible paths through the forest, the party reached a collection of rude huts, which his capture; but this matter did not enter his mind. He went to sleep with the feeling that what he wanted now was a good night's rest, and that, in some way or other, all would be right on the morrow.

Michol, the captain of the band, was very plain-spoken, the next morning, in telling Louis his plans in regard to him. "I know well," he said, "that your mother is able to pay a handsome ransom for you, and, if she is so hard-hearted that she will not do it, I can depend on Barran. He will not let a page from his castle pine away in these woods, for the sake of a handful of gold."

"My mother is not hard-hearted," said Louis, "and I am not going to pine away, no matter how long you keep me. Do you intend to send to my mother to-day?"

"Not so soon as that," replied Michol. "I shall let her have time to feel what a grievous thing it is to have a son carried away to the heart of the forest, where she can never find him, and where he must stay, month after month and year after year, until she pays his worthy captors what she thinks the boy is worth."

"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Louis. "If you will give me my horse and my falcon, which your men have taken from me, and will let me have again my dagger, I will go to Viteau, myself, and tell my mother about the ransom; and I promise you that she will send you all the money she can afford to spend for me in that way. And, if there is no one else to bring it,—for our men might be afraid to venture among so many robbers,—I shall bring it myself, on my way back to Barran's castle. I am not afraid to come."

"I am much pleased to hear that, my boy," said Michol, "but I do not like your plan. When I am ready, I shall send a messenger, and no one will be afraid to bring me the money, when everything is settled. But one thing you can do. If you have ever learned to write,—and I have heard that the Countess of Viteau has taught her sons to be scholars,—you may write a letter to your mother, and tell her in what a doleful plight you find yourself, and how necessary it is that she should send all the money that I ask for. Thus she will see that you are really my prisoner, and will not delay to come to your assistance. One of my men, Jasto, will give you a pen and ink, and something to write your letter on. You may go, now, and look for Jasto. You will know him by his torn clothes and his thirst for knowledge."

"Torn clothes!" said Louis, as he walked away. "They all have clothes of that kind. And, as for his thirst for knowledge, I can not see how I am to find out that. I suppose the Captain wanted to give me something to do, so as to keep me from troubling him. I am not going to look for any Jasto. If I could find my horse, and could get a chance, I should jump on him and gallop away from these fellows."

Louis wandered about among the huts, peering here and there for a sight of Agnes's little jennet. But he saw nothing of him, for the animal had been taken away to another part of the forest, to keep company with other stolen horses. And even if he had been able to mount and ride away unobserved, it would have been impossible for Louis to find his way along the devious paths of the forest to the highway. More than this, although he seemed to be wandering about in perfect liberty, some of the men had orders to keep their eyes upon the boy, and to stop him if he endeavored to penetrate into the forest.

"Ho, there!" said a man, whom Louis suddenly met, as he was walking between two of the huts, "are you looking for anything? What have you lost?"

"I have lost nothing," said Louis, deeming it necessary to reply only to the last question.

"I thought you lost your liberty yesterday," said the other, "and, before that, you must have lost your senses, to be riding alone on a road, walled in for miles and miles by trees, bushes, and brave cotereaux. But, of course, I did not suppose that you came here to look for either your liberty or your senses. What is it you want?"

Louis had no intention of telling the man that he was looking for his horse, and so, as he felt obliged to give some answer, he said:

"I was sent to look for Jasto, so that I could write a letter to my mother."

"Jasto!" exclaimed the man. "Well, my young page, if you find everything in the world as easily as you found Jasto, you will do well. I am Jasto. And do you know how you came to find me?"

"I chanced to meet you," said Louis.

"Not so," said the other. "If I had not been looking for you, you never would have found me. Things often happen in that manner. If what we are looking for does not look for us, we never find it. But what is this about your mother and a letter? Sit down here, in this bit of shade, and make these things plain to me."

Louis accepted this invitation, for the sun was beginning to be warm, and he sat down by the man, at the foot of a tree.

"I do not believe you are Jasto," he said, looking at his companion. "Your clothes are not torn. I was told to look for a man with torn clothes."

LOUIS FINDS ONE OF THE HIGHWAYMEN A GOOD-NATURED FELLOW.

"Torn clothes!" exclaimed the other. "What are you talking of? Not torn? Why, boy, my clothes are more torn and are worse torn and have staid torn longer than the clothes of any man in all our goodly company. But they have been mended, you see, and that is what makes them observable among so many sadly tattered garments."

Louis looked at the coarse jerkin, breeches, and stockings of the man beside him. They were, certainly, torn and ripped in many places, and the torn places were of many curious shapes, as if the wearer had been making a hurried journey through miles of bramble bushes; but all the torn places were carefully mended with bright-red silk thread, which made them more conspicuous than if they had not been mended at all.

"I see that they have been torn," said Louis, "but they are not torn now."

"A great mistake, my good sir page—a great mistake," said the other; "once torn, always torn. If my clothes are mended, that but gives them another quality. Then they have two qualities. They are torn and they are mended. If one's clothes are torn, the only way to have clothes that are not torn is to have new ones. Think of that, boy, and make no rents in yourself nor in your clothes. Although mending can be done very well," he added, looking complacently at his breeches, "the evil of it is, though, that it always shows."

"I could mend better than that," said Louis.

"That is to be hoped; it is truly to be hoped," said the other, "for you have had better chances than I. This red silk, left in our hands by a fair lady, who was taking it to waste it in embroidery in some friend's castle, was all the thread I had for my mending. Now, you could have all things suitable for your mending, whether of clothes or of mind or of body, if it should so happen that you should have rents in any of these. But tell me, now, about your letter."

"There is nothing to tell," said Louis, "excepting that your Captain wishes me to write a letter to my mother, urging her to send good ransom for me, and that he said you could give me pen and ink and something to write upon."

"Pen and ink are well enough," said the man, who, as Louis now believed, was really Jasto, "for I can make them. But something to write on is a more difficult matter to find. Paper is too scarce, and parchment costs too much; and so there is none of either in this company. But I shall see to it that you have something to write on when you are ready to write. It strikes me that the chief trouble will be to put together the three things—the pen and the ink and the something to write on—in such a manner as to make a letter of them. Did you ever write a letter?"

"Not yet. But I know how to do it," said Louis; and, as he spoke, he remembered how he had promised his brother to write a letter to him. He was now going to send a letter to Viteau, but under what strange circumstances it would be written! If he were at the castle, Agnes would help him. He wished he had thought of asking her, weeks ago, to help him.

"I have written a letter myself," said Jasto, "but before I had written it I trembled to say I could do it. And I was a grown man, and had fought in three battles. But pages are bolder than soldiers. Would you like to hear about my letter?"

"Indeed I should," said Louis, anxious to listen to anything which might give him a helping hint regarding the duty he had taken upon himself.

"Well, then," said Jasto, stretching out his legs, "I shall tell you about my letter. It was just before——"

"Jasto!" rang out a voice from the opposite side of the inclosure formed by the huts.

"There!" cried Jasto, jumping to his feet, "that is the Captain. I must go. But you sit still, just where you are, and when I come back, which will be shortly, I shall tell you about my letter."