“Nor I. Well, we must entertain him. King’s Excise or not, William Huggins was always companionable. A fair show of the lads here. You’ll be at the meeting to-night?”
The merchant grunted. Presently he said, “What sort o’ man does Sally say he is?”
“I don’t know. Sally’s out of heart, with Jim and Haigh all these months in York. Small wonder.”
Matthew Moon frowned again, and was silent for a minute. Then he looked up and said, “Ye said entertainment, Arthur. Supervisors must take their chance o’ that. Don’t start taking it heady. Tongues tie knots that teeth can’t loose, and we don’t want the speech and confession of Arthur Monjoy yet. Two in York’s enough. Shall I be at the meeting? Yes; but don’t go and take things too headstrong.”
The big man laughed. “If I remember, they wanted to set the dogs on Huggins at first; none of that,” he said; and as the merchant moved away the whole word “COINING” showed on the stone pillar.
Under the bow-windowed shops and houses the vendors of tinware and early market-stuff and wanded chairs and wooden vessels were knocking up their light booths; but no wares were yet displayed, for in Horwick the cloth market takes precedence of all else, and it is a fine of forty shillings, all but a penny, to as much as ask the price of a piece of cloth before the first stroke of the bell in the little round-topped turret of the Piece Hall. Among these minor merchants the women moved and gossipped. The waspish wife of Pim o’ Cuddy, the Wadsworth verger, declared that she would not live with her husband another day—but she had left him at regular intervals any time this twenty years. Fat, gap-toothed Dooina Benn, who mashed herbs and distilled simples and rendered services to her sex that Mrs. Pim o’ Cuddy was now little likely ever to stand in need of, exchanged tidings of the December’s asthmas and lumbagos, and declared that she had scarce an ounce of gentian left to her name. They, too, spoke of the new resident excise officer, but their voices fell as Sally Northrop passed. Sally managed the “Cross Pipes” during her husband’s absence. Jim Northrop and Will Haigh should have been back from York months ago; and on a January afternoon, during Jim’s detention, Dooina had been sent for to Sally in haste—the innkeeper’s wife had been brought to bed of a son. Not far from the women, Mish Murgatroyd held in a leash his choicest specimen of dogflesh, a currant-eyed, brindled brute, heavy as a man, heavily muzzled and formidable. Curs and terriers and mastiffs, noses to the ground, threaded in and out across the market-place invisible scents and tracks of their own, and a group of Back o’ th’ Mooiners looked admiringly at the animal.
“Hares? Birds? Nay!” Mish said, setting his cap back from his forehead that had a bull’s-front of rough hair over his brows, but showed two great calf-licks over his temples. “Keep off him, Charley, for all he’s muzzled. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t like to slip him at a man; no, not muzzled. Sitha!” A terrier had approached the brindled dog. The ferocious creature had not growled, but the terrier crawled away, tail and belly to earth. “What d’ye think o’ that?” exclaimed Mish, exultingly.
Suddenly there was a stir under the stable-arch of the “Cross Pipes,” and the noise about the inn fell. The hush seemed to spread instantaneously, and out of every upper window heads were thrust. Then, at the entrance of the stable-arch, a pack was flung down as if by inadvertence, and somebody stumbled over it. A tall weaver turned with a heavy budget on his back and jostled somebody. A man laughed. Then the weavers fell of their own accord back to the pieceboards, and the new Supervisor of the King’s Excise was seen to be standing on the cobbles.
They have, as the Wadsworth parson had discovered, a humour of their own Horwick way. As if at a signal, there was a general catching of breath, and then a shout of laughter went up. Men clambered to the pieceboards to look over their neighbours’ shoulders at the oddity that had been sent to them for an exciseman.
He was ludicrous, half a man only, a dwarf. An ordinary flight of steps would have taxed his diminutive legs; his body and shoulders were those of an undersized lad; and, awkwardly set on them, an enormous head wagged. His complexion was floury, and looked as if, had you touched it, a mothy dust would have adhered to your finger. A pair of round, black-rimmed spectacles made a double-O under his forehead, and behind them a pair of drowsy, blinking eyelids, purple with veining, showed scarce half of the greenish irises beneath them. He made alarmed and nervous movements with his hands as a hundred dogs pressed about him.