"Everybody knows you get it every Saturday from the station, sir."
"But how?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Woodman. "But—but I do wish you'd show me what you write in it, sir. I swear I won't tell the other fellows!"
Harry was temporarily dumb. Then he burst out in an excited whisper: how in the wide world did they know he wrote for the thing? Woodman would not say. A lot of them did know it, but they had agreed not to sneak—for which observation he apologised in the same breath. Woodman whispered too; never were two such conspirators.
And the immediate result was altogether inevitable. Harry loved a word of praise from anybody, like many a better man, and Woodman was as much above the average boy in sense of humour as he was below him in the ordinary endowments. That Sunday, before he went to sleep, he had read every false rhyme and every unblushing inversion of Harry's which had yet found their way into print. It may have been very demoralising—it has never been held that Harry had even the makings of an ideal pedagogue—but the small boy actually went to sleep with a T.T. under his pillow. And next day when he was permitted abroad in his room, and, after the doctor's visit, to go down to Mr. Scrafton for an hour, it was with T.T. stowed hastily in his jacket pocket that Woodman made his reappearance in the upper schoolroom.
Unaware that he had been allowed to leave his bed, Harry contrived to run upstairs during the morning with a boy's magazine which one of the other boarders had received from home that morning. Finding the room empty, Harry only hoped his convalescent was breaking the journey from bed to Scrafton in some more temperate zone, but on his way downstairs he could not help pausing at that sinister shut door, and this was what he heard.
"Where did you get it?" No answer—thud. "Where—did—you—get it?" No answer—thud—and so on some four or five times, with a dull thud after each fruitless reiteration.
Cold breath seemed to gather on Harry's forehead as on glass; an instinct told him what was happening.
"I am going on, you know," continued Scrafton, dropping his normal bluster for a snarl of subtler malice, "until—you—tell—me—where—you—got——"
A blow was falling between each word, and what Harry saw as he entered was Scrafton leaning across a corner of the table, with his ogre's face glaring into little Woodman's, and the unlucky Tiddler grasped in his left hand, while with his right fist he kept punching, punching, punching, with unvarying aim and precision, between the shoulder and the chest of the child. No single blow would have drawn a tear, nor might the series have left a mark, but the little white face was positively deathly with the cumulative pain, and, though his lips might have been sewn together, a tear dropped on Woodman's slate as Harry entered softly. Next instant Scrafton was seated on the floor, and Harry Ringrose standing over him, brandishing the chair that he had tugged from under the bully's body.