"They look as if they cold do a day's work as well as mine," he said, holding out a pair of rough, strong limbs, with sinews like those of Longfellow's village blacksmith, and muscles standing out, hard and healthy, as a working man's should be. "Let me feel your muscles, buoy." He gripped Geo's arm as he spoke. "Pulp!" he ejaculated, not ill-naturedly, however—"pulp! How come they like that? Have you had th' fever, buoy!"
"Mighty little fever about him," said the man who had spoken first. "That's want a' work wot's the matter a' him! He never had a wet jacket a' his life! He's too much a' th' gentleman, is Mr. George Lummis, and so was his father before 'im—like father, like son. He was a precious sight too grand to keep his own wife when he was alive, and niver did na more nor trap a rabbit when there worn't nothin' to eat in th' house."
"You lie!" said George, with sudden anger leaping up in his face, and standing with blazing eyes staring at the sneering workman. "Say what you like about me, but you leave my father alone, or I'll know what for."
"Hullo, hullo!" said the good-natured man, who was a stranger, and had no idea of raising such a storm when he remarked on Geo's very apparent strength of frame. "Hullo! stow that; that a sight too hot for quarrelling. We'll ha' to go to work again in twenty minutes, and tha would be a good lot more pleasant to have a whiff a' bacca than commin' to fisticuffs a' this heat. Sit down, young man, and don't be a fule."
But Geo was much to irate to follow this obviously good advice. Without appearing to notice the stranger's words, he strolled off with as unconcerned an air as he could to the bridge. His possible good resolutions had all faded away, swallowed up in the blow his vanity had received, and a few minutes later he had joined his friends Farley and Corkam in their far less harmless "'levenses" at the inn. Here he regaled them with an account of his passage of arms with the stranger, and received their sympathy and strongly-expressed advice to do as he pleased, "and be hanged to them!" There might be a late "haysel," and he might get taken on for the time, and put a few pounds in his pocket to tide him over till harvest. So when Milly passed over the bridge at about one o'clock with her grandfather's dinner, which she was taking to him where he was at work to save him the hot walk home and back, she saw Geo with a flushed face and bravado air leaning against the bridge, with his familiar pals on either side. Milly saw, but she took no notice, and passed with her head in the air and an angry spot on either cheek. The girl was furious with herself for having taken an interest, even a momentary one, in such a worthless, good-for-nothing as Geo, and still more annoyed to think that she had let him see it.
"That's a tidy maid," said the cripple, with the air of a critic, as she passed, and both men were surprised at Geo's answer.
"What's that to you?" said Geo, in a sullen tone; and he crossed over, and became apparently completely engrossed in watching for a trout under a stone.
CHAPTER IX.
NURSE BLUNT ARRIVES
The last days of May were over, and June was here, but since the visit of the dowser there had fallen no drop of rain. The fever was in no-ways abated. There had been several more deaths and several new cases; another young Chapman was down with it; the isolation hospital was full, and a fierce battle was going on among the guardians as to the expediency of admitting sick people into the Union Infirmary.