"Yet most essential," retorted Dick. "Fizz off, Mr. Mawdster; I don't want to take root here!"
Considering how glibly he had arrived at the total it seemed to take the manager of the Cleartype Press an unusual time to arrange the items of the bill. It filled a quarto-memo, before he was satisfied with it, and altogether looked a very imposing document. But the signature over the stamp was all Dick looked at or cared about.
"That'll do," he said. "Good-bye to you, Mr. Mawdster."
"Stop!" cried the printer, still boiling hot. "I don't know where you got this money from—perhaps I ought to enquire—but don't think you've washed out all your obligations by it, my lad. You have brazenly confessed to beating my poorly son, and I know enough about Foxenby's rules to imagine what a row you'll be in when, to-morrow, I tell Mr. Wykeham of your illegal brutality."
On all counts, this would have been a threat permitting no possible repartee, as it was clearly undeniable that Dick had taken the law into his own hands and broken one of Foxenby's strictest regulations. But Dick had a brain-wave worthy of Roger—a happy thought which made him feel almost proud of his intuition.
"Yes, Mr. Mawdster," he replied, "and I know sufficient of Moston's social rules to guess what townspeople would think of you, the local paragon, 'the granny white hen that never laid away', if they learnt that you had taken advantage of a schoolboy's misfortunes to try to blackmail him into showing favour to your namby-pamby son. If you come with any of your sneaking tales to Foxenby to-morrow, I can find ways and means of retaliating."
This sudden turning of the tables visibly upset the printer.
"Don't you have the impertinence to libel me, young feller," he snarled. "I possess the unbounded esteem of everybody in Moston."
"Not quite everybody, as I happen to know," retorted Dick, with kindly thoughts of "Chuck" Smithies, whose estimate of Aaron Mawdster's character had provided him with this verbal weapon.
"I don't care what you say," spluttered the angry printer. "I shall come up to Foxenby to-morrow."