Again, this happened a couple of days afterwards. The supervisor came out of his house that morning and was passing, with his customary greeting, down the croft. As he did so, Cole’s magpie fell to whistling to his short step the song of “Hey, Johnny Cope.” Cope stopped short, put his hand to his ear, and then deliberately walked back. He descended the narrow well of the clogger’s doorway, adjusted his spectacles, and craned his head forward towards the bird in the cage.
“Your bird, Mr. Cole?”
“Ay—ay—he’s mine,” the clogger replied timorously; the exciseman had never before entered his shop.
“Extraordinarily imitative creatures,” Cope observed, putting his hand to the door of the cage.
“See he doesn’t bite ye,” the clogger said tremulously.
“Eh?” said the exciseman sharply; and then, glancing malevolently over his shoulder at the clogger, and showing his corner teeth like a dog, he seized the bird with a quick movement. “Some folk, however, cannot abide them,” he said. He drew the bird out, calmly wrung its neck, and flung the still palpitating body on the bench. Then he stepped to the door, mounted the steps, and turned.
“Good morning, Mr. Cole,” he said, and passed again down the croft.
A pigeon, homing to Pim o’ Cuddy at Wadsworth, carried a message that John Raikes had arrived in York, but brought no further news. Cope was now shunned by many, and the clogger contrived to dodge out of his sight whenever he passed. After the incident of the magpie, it began to go about that he was not a man, but a devil and a ghoul; nevertheless, he avoided none, and he was to be seen wherever men met for ale and talk and tobacco. As if a contagion emanated from him, he was allowed a corner to himself at the “Cross Pipes”; and the next thing was that he ceased to visit the “Pipes.” That came about in this way.
Little was now said openly about the two men incarcerated in York Castle; but as if an imp pushed him to it, Cope himself seemed unable to keep his tongue off it. It chanced that somebody’s wain-pole had cracked (or it might have been a loom-timber), and a smith had made an iron collar to shrink over the split portion. The smith, sitting in the inn and toying with the ring as he talked, had set it over his wrist like a bracelet; and all at once Matthew Moon took his wrist, removed the fetter, handed it back to him, and bade him keep it in his pocket. Then, looking up, he caught Cope’s eye. The exciseman smiled.
“I think you and I were thinking the same thing, Mr. Moon,” he said.