“Yes, come along,” said Philip, rubbing his back and twisting with pain.
“No, I shan’t run,” said Harry; “the cowards have half killed poor Dick, or I’d set him at them. I know who they are,—there’s Bill Jenkins, and the two Stapleses. Don’t I wish I was bigger, I’d give it them;” and Harry ground his teeth together, and clenched his fists tightly.
“Yah; yah-ha; go home!” shouted the assailants. But Harry wouldn’t budge an inch, but stooped down and began to tie his pocket handkerchief round the dog’s bleeding head.
“Yah-ah! yah-ah-ah-ah; go home wi’ yer!” shouted the lads again, running up, evidently meaning to chevy the Grange boys away; and this seemed an easy task, for the new-comers were all bigger and stronger. “Yah-ah-ah-ah; go home!” they shouted again; and then one, who seemed to be the leader, said to his comrades,—“Let’s pitch the dog in, come on.”
“You’d better not touch him, Bill Jenkins,” said Harry, turning very white, either with fear or rage. “We did not interfere with you, so leave us alone.”
“Yah-ah-ah-ah; go home with yer!” shouted the boys again, for this seemed to be a kind of battle-cry with which they warmed themselves to attack the inoffensive party. Philip half-screwed himself behind Harry, while Fred, who felt dreadfully alarmed, stood behind Philip.
“Let us go home quietly, please,” said Fred, “and I’ll give you a shilling.”
“Give us the shilling, then,” said the boy called Jenkins, who, upon its being produced, snatched it away from Fred, put it in his pocket, and then laid hold of the dog’s hind leg and dragged it towards the river.
“You let him go now, come,” whimpered Harry.
“Wow—wow—wow—wow—wow—wow,” said the boys, mocking Harry’s whimper, and in another moment poor Dick would have been plunged in, when Harry, pushing back one of the Stapleses, who tried to stop him, planted such a well-directed blow in Bill Jenkins’s ear that he dropped the dog in a moment, and shook his head as though something was buzzing inside it, as no doubt there was, for the blow was a smart one, Master Harry having had boxing gloves on more than once at school.