Dick pressed his fingers into his ears when at the third or fourth stroke Jake began to howl. The Squire gave him full measure; then bade him begone, and take care not to offend again, declaring that he should not get off so easily next time.
"Now, Dick," he said, returning to the room, "what is the meaning of all this?"
Thereupon Dick made a clean breast of it, telling all that had happened since the rescue of Penwarden. The Squire's face clouded as he listened to the story.
"John Trevanion is at the bottom of this," he cried, thumping the table. "They would never believe I was against them unless their minds had been poisoned. I will see Tonkin to-morrow and get at the truth." Then, with one of the swift changes of mood characteristic of him, he added: "No, I won't do it. I won't gratify that cur; he shall never think I care a snap for him. Tell me if anything of the kind happens again, and I will myself go over to see Sir Bevil. On my life, the toad shall smart if he is proved to be stirring folk against me."
Every succeeding incident in this series did but confirm the village folk in their conviction that the Squire was now their declared enemy, and in staunch alliance with the revenue officers.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
A Light on the Moor
Next day everybody in Polkerran knew of Jake Tonkin's thrashing. It was discussed by the men in tap-rooms, on the jetty, in barns and piggeries, in mills and cobblers' work-rooms. Fishwives chattered about it on their doorsteps and at their windows. Boys meeting their playmates asked if they had heard that Jake Tonkin had been walloped by Squire, and Jake, as the victim of two assaults of this nature in succession, was looked upon as something of a hero. Public opinion was dead against the Squire, and was perhaps only the stronger because it was in the wrong.
It was clear that John Trevanion intended to make himself as unpleasant as possible to his relative. In the afternoon a number of men were seen mounting the steep road from the village to the cliff, drawing trolleys laden with short narrow planks of wood. On reaching the green level they proceeded to erect fences on the ground that had formerly been the Squire's, and was now John Trevanion's. By the end of the next day a large portion of the land was enclosed, the effect of these operations being that the inmates of the Towers were cramped in their movements out of doors, being restricted to the high road and the various rights of way, which even the landlord could not close against them.
Sam Pollex hoped that the Squire would retaliate. The Beal, from which the huer was accustomed to show his signals to the pilchard fishers, was still Mr. Trevanion's property, and he could, if he chose, fence it round in the same way. But there was nothing petty in the Squire's nature. He was not the man to take a mean revenge on his neighbours, so that when a fisher reported one evening that he had seen sharks and grampuses some distance out at sea, a sure sign that the pilchards were coming, the villagers went to bed without any fear that access would be forbidden to the usual haunt.