“Hope you like yer dead bird,” came in a muffled, jeering voice from Aaron, who had evidently more spirit than strength, “hurry ’ome, I would, and make a pie of him.”
Then, as he felt himself released from his oppressor, he went on, “Ah! that’s better now, hold him off, young gentlemen.” For Jack and Phil had pinioned Andrew from behind, and were dragging him back. In his rage, Andrew was kicking out right and left, so that had his fellow knights been wearing any visible armour, he would certainly have inflicted many dints upon it.
His cousins, however, were well used to schoolboys’ mills and stuck to their guns. Even Gaston and Hubert, at a wink from them, had risen to the occasion. Each had seized one of Andrew’s feet and was hanging on to it, like little terriers to a rat.
But the girls were pale and tearful. Phoena was absorbed by her grief for the thrush’s death, but Fay and Di were ashamed of the whole business.
“You had no right to deceive us about the bird,” said Fay to the cobbler, who was now calmly resuming his cobbling, leaving the “young uns” to square up accounts by themselves; “you ought to have told us it was dead, when we first asked you about it.”
“You ought to have asked if it was alive, if you were particular on that point,” retorted Jonas, catching the end of his long thread between his teeth, and suiting it to the length he desired.
“Of course, we supposed it was.”
“Never should suppose anything without knowing it for sartin.”
“But we’d seen it alive so lately,” began Phoena.
“Well, and if you had happened to have come an hour earlier, you’d have seen it alive then. ’Twasn’t my fault, it died.”