Suddenly, one morning when he was in a hollow of the downs throwing pebbles at a tree, he heard a voice:
“Hands up, or I fire!”
He turned round and saw the eldest of the quartette quite close to him. Although he had spoken so fiercely, he was not looking fierce, but, rather, was smiling in a curious crooked kind of way. Jeremy could see him more clearly than before, and a strange enough object he was.
He was wearing a dirty old pair of flannel cricketing trousers and a grubby shirt open at the neck. One of his eyes was bruised and he had a cut across his nose, but the thing in the main that struck Jeremy now was his appearance of immense physical strength. His muscles seemed simply to bulge under his shirt, he had the neck of a prize-fighter. He was a great deal older than Jeremy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age. His eyes, which were grey and clear, were his best feature, but he was no beauty, and in his dirty clothes and with his bruises he looked a most dangerous character.
Jeremy called Hamlet to him and held him by the collar.
“All right,” the ruffian said; “I’m not going to touch your dog.”
“I didn’t think you were,” said Jeremy, lying.
“Oh, yes, you did. I suppose you think we eat dog-flesh and murder babies. Lots of people do.”
The sudden sense that other folk in the world also thought the quartette outlaws was new to Jeremy. He had envisaged the affair as a struggle in which the Cole family only were engaged.
“Eat babies!” Jeremy cried. “No! Do you?”