The more rampant, active, and tireless his power of mischief, the closer I wrapped him in my affections.
From gray dawn to dewy eve these chums and boon companions of mine flocked about the castle. They worshipped me as their leader and yielded an implicit obedience to my commands as were I possessed of some mastery over them.
The elder baron saw the gathering cloud and bent his head as if to meet the coming storm with better chance of resisting it.
Came there a dinner party, the choicest Burgundy was found to have been spirited away and the bottles filled with common claret. Did the elder baron meet his friends in the fields for a trial with the hawks, it was only to discover that they had been so overfed as to sit stupidly placid when the hood was removed. Let the cook be told that guests were expected, and that he must be careful to have the little dumplings of his soup extra delicate, to the elder baron’s horror, a cherry stone would be found in the centre of each little dumpling.
One of my coadjutors was venturesome enough to pilfer the elder baron’s snuff box and fill it with pepper. The result may be imagined. Another took good care to pour water into all the tinder boxes before the guests called for their pipes. Upon attempting to rise from the table, here and there a queue would be found securely tied to the back of the chair.
One of my favorite exploits was to station myself on the first landing of the stairway and “hold the bridge like Horatius Cocles of old,” my wild band of two dozen young barbarians rushing madly up the staircase with screams, yells and vociferations which would have done credit to any horde of real savages I have ever visited, while I, with my wooden sabre, beat down their sticks, occasionally rapping too bold a youngster on the knuckles and sending him bawling to the foot of the stairway, to Bulger’s infinite amusement, as he always insisted upon taking part in the fray and gloried in my prowess.
At last to my great joy, I noticed that the elder baron showed signs of surrender.
Like a prudent general I ordered an attack all along the line.
There was to be a fox hunt the next day. I directed one of my trusted lieutenants to feed the hounds all the raw meat they could swallow, about an hour before the start.
Ten others, most fleet-footed and glib-tongued, I dispatched to the houses of the ten leading physicians and surgeons of the town and its immediate neighborhood, with the same message to each, namely, that every man, woman and child at the manor house had been taken violently ill, and that the greatest haste must be made to come with their medicine chests so that the epidemic might be checked.