“Nay, nay, we wean’t do that,” shouted one of the men.
“But I may tell you that Mr Marston says that he does not believe there’s a man among you who would do him any harm.”
“Hooray!” shouted one of the men, and this was followed by a roar. “We wouldn’t hurt the ganger, and we’re going to pay out him as did.”
There was a tremendous yell at this, and the men nourished their weapons in a way that looked serious for the culprit if he should be discovered.
“Ay, but yow’ve got to find out first who it was,” said Hickathrift.
“Yes, and we’re going to find out too,” cried one rough-looking fellow standing forward. “How do we know as it warn’t you?”
“Me!” cried Hickathrift, staring blankly.
“Ay, yow,” roared the great rough-looking fellow, a man not far short of the wheelwright’s size. “We’ve heered all on you a going on and pecking about the dree-ern being made. We know yow all hates our being here, so how do we know it warn’t yow?”
The man’s fierce address was received with an angry outburst by the men, who had come out on purpose to inflict punishment upon some one, and in their excitement, one object failing, they were ready to snatch at another.
It was perhaps an insensate trick; but there was so much of the frank manly British boy in Dick Winthorpe that he forgot everything in the fact that big Hickathrift, the man he had known from a child—the great bluff fellow who had carried him in his arms and hundreds of times made him welcome in that wonderland, his workshop, where he was always ready to leave off lucrative work to fashion him eel-spear or leaping-pole, or to satisfy any other whim that was on the surface—that this old friend was being menaced by a great savage of a stranger nearly as big as himself, and backed by a roaring excited crowd who seemed ready for any outrage.