“Murder!”
Dr. Crackenthorpe looked at me across the water a long minute; then, never taking his eyes off my face, lifted up the skirts of his coat and began to shamble and jerk out the most ludicrous parody of a dance I have ever seen. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped and was doubled up in a suffocating cackle of laughter.
Presently recovering himself, he walked off down the bank to a point where the stream narrowed, and motioned me to come opposite him.
“It’s not from fear of you and your sexton,” he explained, still gasping out the dry dust of his humor. “Your exquisite pleasantry has weakened my vocal chords—that’s all.”
I treated him to a long stare of most sovereign contempt. For all his assumed enjoyment, I fancied he was pretty observant of my mood and that he was calculating the nature of the charge I had fired at him.
“And whom did I murder?” he said, making a great show of mopping his face with his handkerchief.
“Say it was my brother Modred.”
“I’m glad, for your sake, to hear you qualify it. You should be, that there is no witness to this gross slander. I presume you to be, then, one of that pleasant family of Trender, who have a local reputation none of the sweetest.”
He came down close to the water’s edge—we were but a little distance apart there—and shook a long finger at me.
“My friend, my friend,” he said, sternly, “your excuse must be the hot-headedness of youth. For the sake of your father, who once enjoyed my patronage, I will forbear answering a fool according to his folly. For his sake I will be gentle and convincing, where it is my plain duty, I am afraid, to chastise. This man you speak of is a heavy drinker, and is now, by your own showing, on the verge of delirium tremens. Do you take the gross imaginings of such a person for gospel?”