ll, what quantity of provisions will you send us?

_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 t