Const. How many are you?

John. Nay, we do not ask enough for all our company.  We are in three companies.  If you will send us bread for twenty men and about six or seven women for three days, and show us the way over the field you speak of, we desire not to put your people into any fear for us.  We will go out of our way to oblige you, though we are as free from infection as you are.

     Const. And will you assure us that your other people shall offer
     us no new disturbance?

     John. No, no; you may depend on it.

     Const. You must oblige yourself, too, that none of your people
     shall come a step nearer than where the provisions we send you
     shall be set down.

     John. I answer for it, we will not.

Here he called to one of his men, and bade him order Captain Richard and his people to march the lower way on the side of the marshes, and meet them in the forest; which was all a sham, for they had no Captain Richard or any such company.

Accordingly, they sent to the place twenty loaves of bread and three or four large pieces of good beef, and opened some gates, through which they passed; but none of them had courage so much as to look out to see them go, and as it was evening, if they had looked, they could not have seen them so as to know how few they were.

This was John the soldier’s management; but this gave such an alarm to the county, that, had they really been two or three hundred, the whole county would have been raised upon them, and they would have been sent to prison, or perhaps knocked on the head.

They were soon made sensible of this, for two days afterwards they found several parties of horsemen and footmen also about, in pursuit of three companies of men armed, as they said, with muskets, who were broke out from London and had the plague upon them, and that were not only spreading the distemper among the people, but plundering the country.

As they saw now the consequence of their case, they soon saw the danger they were in:  so they resolved, by the advice also of the old soldier, to divide themselves again.  John and his two comrades, with the horse, went away as if towards Waltham,[200]—­the other in two companies, but all a little asunder,—­and went towards Epping.[200]

The first night they encamped all in the forest, and not far off from one another, but not setting up the tent for fear that should discover them.  On the other hand, Richard went to work with his ax and his hatchet, and, cutting down branches of trees, he built three tents or hovels, in which they all encamped with as much convenience as they could expect.