The good woman lifted his hair gently.
“Gracious me! A lump as big as a duck’s egg,” she cried. “You’ve been fighting again, I’ll be bound, though I’d have thought——”
“Don’t be a goose, Susan,” Martin interrupted. “If I’d fought, the bump would have been in front. I was hit a foul blow, and I’ll tell you.”
Susan Gollop was more tender in action than in speech. She bathed the wounded head and bound it up with a strip of linen, while Martin recounted the events of the evening.
“Dear, dear! Well, I’m sure! Poor little boy! Oh, the wretch!” she exclaimed at points of the story.
“Well, I never did hear the like,” she said at the end. “That Slocum: it’s my belief he’s doing something he’s ashamed of, or ought to be, drat him! It’s a mercy you don’t work for him any more. And the other man; would you know him again? For you must tell Gollop all about it, and he’ll take the wretch up and see what the magistrates have to say to him.”
“Yes, I’d know him again,” Martin replied. “I couldn’t forget his big red nose and his beard as black as your saucepan.”
“That’s strange,” said the woman thoughtfully.
“What’s strange?”
“Why, if I didn’t see just such a one this very day! Ay, and in this very street. He passed me as I came back from shopping! ‘That’s a red coal in a black grate,’ thinks I, and indeed he was a fearsome-looking creature.”