"Well, I didn't want them to hunt for you. I'm going to keep you here till you do what I want," said Tinker with a seraphic smile.
"You young rascal! You mean to try and keep me here!" screamed Mr. Lambert, jumping about in a light, but ungainly fashion. "Oh, I'll teach you! I'll make you repent this till your dying day! You think you can keep me here! You shall see. The first shepherd, the first keeper who passes will let me out. And I won't rest"—and he swore an oath quite unfit for boyish ears—"till I've hunted you down!"
"No one will come within a mile of the Deil's Den," said the unruffled Tinker. "It's haunted by a headless woman and a redheaded man with his throat cut. But perhaps you've seen them. Besides, I've told them that there's a man in brown who shouts and waves, and then disappears when anyone comes to the tower. Why, if they see you, they'll run for their lives." He spoke with a convicting quietness.
Mr. Lambert doubled up over the parapet in a gasping anguish.
"You're not going to leave here till you give me a letter for your clerk, telling him to hand over Sir Tancred Beauleigh's promissory note," said Tinker.
Mr. Lambert rejected the suggestion in extravagant language.
"You bandy words with me!" cried the Baron Hildebrand Anne of Ardrochan. "Lambert of London, beware! Think, rash rogue, on your grinders! Hans and Jorgan, prepare the red-hot pincers! You have a quarter of an hour to reflect, Lambert."
He flung himself off his pony, tethered it, strode down to the spring which trickled out of the hillside some forty yards away, and came back bearing a big jug full of water.
Mr. Lambert watched him in a bursting fury, at whiles scanning the empty hills with a raging eye. Suddenly light dawned on him: "Are you the boy who stole the flying-machine?" he cried.
"You mind your own business!" said Tinker tartly; it was his cherished belief that he had borrowed the flying-machine.