"Silence! Silence!" he shouted out. "This is no laughing matter, Mayne; and you, Trelawny; and you, Cornwallis major. We ought to weep rather than laugh. Here is sortilege, necromancy, black art in our midst! Here we find a boy permeated with the—with the fetishism, the thaumaturgy, the demonology of the savage and the cannibal. And, what is more astounding still, we find him at Merivale! Take off that tail, sir!"
Smythe undid the tail, and took it off. There was a bright red mark all round his white body, and I should think the tail must have given him a pretty good doing. A tiger's hair is undoubtedly scratchy when applied to a tender part of the human frame, like the stomach; and perhaps savages know this, and that is really the reason why they wear them. Because nobody who kept a tiger's tail under his clothes for any length of time could help getting fairly snappy, if not actually fierce.
The Doctor ordered me to bring him the tail, because I happened to be near, and he caught my eye. This I did, and meantime Smythe got back into his clothes. Then the Doctor told the school it could go about its business—all but the culprit; and he marched away solemnly and slowly with Smythe and the tail.
The tail was very skilfully sewn back into its original place, and nobody who did not know the truth could have guessed at what had happened to it. And Smythe told us afterwards that Dunstan talked to him till tea-time, and then, suddenly reminded of the hour by the bell, flogged him, but very slightly. It is always a hopeful sign if the Doctor begins a row with talk; and the longer he talks, the less painful is the end. But if he begins with the licking and talks afterwards, it is bad, and adding insult to injury, as Steggles says.
One thing may be worth mentioning. The Doctor never asked for details, so Smythe never gave him any; and, as old Dunstan never heard about what Freckles did, or I did, we escaped intact. This made what Smythe had done seem far worse than it was. Of course we richly rewarded the kid for being such a jolly good plucked one, and gave him many a thing worth having; and we also made it up pretty thoroughly to Fowle for writing the anonymous letter to the Doctor. It proved to be him, because nobody else in the dormitory ever kept awake after everybody else was asleep, which was in itself a beastly mean thing to do; and we made him finally confess that he had spotted the tail. With the help of a Chinese torture that Tin Lin Chow had shown us, we made him confess. It is beautifully simple, and a kid can do it. And when Fowle confessed at the first twinge, and said he did it for revenge because young Smythe had cheeked him in front of about twenty chaps, we felt that he was beneath a fine thing like a Chinese torture, and just kicked the calves of his legs for a little while, and then arranged, as a punishment, for the whole school to send him to Coventry for a week. Which was done.
RICHMOND MINIMUS, PREACHER
No. V
RICHMOND MINIMUS, PREACHER
I
Properly speaking he wasn't 'minimus' in his preaching days; but once there were three Richmonds in the field, as Dr. Dunstan used to say, and after Richmond major went to Sandhurst, young Richmond ought to have become 'minor,' and very much wanted to, but nobody could get into the way of changing it. Even when he was left all alone and Richmond minor left to go into a tea merchant's office, chaps still called him 'minimus.'