Tom did as he was bid, but with manifest reluctance.
“Well, what do you say to his clothes now? Spick and span, eh?”
“Nay, they’re mucky enough.”
“Mud-stained from top to toe, aren’t they?”
“Yo’ can see for yersen, can’t yo’,” answered Tom surlily.
“Come, don’t get cross. You don’t look so amiable as you did. Will you please explain to their Worships how it comes that a man whose clothes were spick and span when you saw him at the Fair, and spick and span when he called at ‘The Warren House,’ as I can prove by the landlord, was a mass of mud from head to foot when you landed him at the lock-up?”
“He got it i’ th’ tussle, aw reckon.”
“What, among the rain-washed bracken?”
And Tom stammered and looked this way and that, any way but at Mr. Blackburn, and then lapsed into sulky silence. Mr. Blackburn beamed on him as though he loved him, and said persuasively:
“Now, after all, doesn’t it look as if this terrible tussle took place on the road and not in the Plantation?”