“A flood of it, just to get my balance straight.”
“You can have it by and by. Ale is food for men, but poison to this cry-baby fit that’s taken you.”
Geordie Wiseman shifted from foot to foot, and glowered at the Master. “We’re not all made of boulder-stone and whipcord. It would come easy to you to face the devil and his witch-hounds—but I’m a usual man, like most of my neighbours.”
“They’ve put the token on us, Geordie.”
“Aye, yammer at it. To be sure they have, and you fancy it a merry-making.”
“Listen to me. There’ll be merry-making by and by; but we’ve to mow a long swathe before then. I’m sick and weary of the Wilderness Folk—sick of the toll they’re levying on white-blooded men.”
“My blood’s red enough, Hardcastle of Logie. If you doubt it—why, here’s my coat off, and off goes yours.”
“That’s the spirit,” laughed Hardcastle. “You’re readier for what I have to tell you than you were awhile since.”
“Aye,” mocked Rebecca from the doorway—“readier than he was just now, when he rived the door of my kitchen wide, and stepped in with a face made of tallow. ‘We’ll all be murdered in our beds,’ says he. ‘Not me for one,’ says I. ‘I’ll be murdered standing, if at all—giving as good as I get while it lasts.’ That’s what I said to Geordie—and now he’s prancing up and down like a turkey-cock, with his coat half-off.”
Wiseman’s wrath against the Master found a new channel. “As for you, Rebecca, it’s plain you know less than a child what the token means, left on a man’s gate.”