"Where you were best not come," Ned answered, crashing into the bushes on the right hand. But Miles turned doggedly in his steps, through the first crisp thickets and then along the miry ground by the edge of the pool, where the air was so muggy that he wondered Ned cared to keep up his reckless pace.
Of necessity the speed slackened, as they clambered over the pebbles and pushed aside the crackling undergrowth of a dry gully in the northern hillside, but it was not till they were tramping through the hushed woods on the summit that Ned spoke: "Did you know, Miley, my father was a gentleman? A great family, the Listers, up Yorkshire way. But he was a mere younger son, and he married a pretty serving wench out of his father's hall, so they would have no more of him. But he was a gentleman, and he tried to give me a smattering of decent breeding,—" there Ned began to laugh, with the corners of his mouth drawn up, and his eyes mirthless,—"and I am a brisk serving fellow, whom the master pommels at will, eh, Miles? And they set a clod like Edward Dotey over me."
There was going to be a fight, Miles guessed, but though at another time he might have been secretly glad at the prospect of such excitement, he had seen one man knocked flat that day, and it had not been amusing, so now he was not over-zealous for the sport. "Come back and fish, Ned," he coaxed, plucking at his companion's sleeve, when that very moment, on the hillside below them, both caught the sound of an axe falling on wood.
After that Miles scrambled down the slope, eager as Ned himself, in his curiosity to see what would follow. A little clearing it was they came out in, where one tree had been newly felled, and its clean stump showed yellow; by the tree trunk, leaning on his axe and wiping his sweaty forehead with his sleeve, stood Dotey.
"Well, Neddy, I've come to talk with you," Lister greeted him, in a fleering voice, and on the word set himself down on the stump, with his hands clasped about one knee.
At first it was a talking, that lay all on Ned's side, while Dotey tried to keep up a pretense of work. Ned spoke words, well-chosen and stinging, that should make even stolid Dotey wince, and spoke them in a jibing tone, with a hateful laugh that startled Miles, even more than the sight of the little pulsing motion of the blood in Ned's dark cheeks.
Dotey swung round impatiently at last. "Hold your tongue, will you?" he cried.
"It is thou who wert better have held thy tongue, Neddy, before thou wentst blabbing to Hopkins of what passed between us."
"I did not," Dotey answered blankly.
"Thou art a liar," quoth Ned, quietly, and still hugging his knee.