“Wild cats and furies!” cried Mr Kennedy, turning sharply round and seizing Harry by the collar, “why d’you kick up such a row, eh?”
“It’s only tincture of rhubarb,” repeated the boy, disengaging himself and holding up the phial triumphantly.
“So it is, I declare,” exclaimed Mr Kennedy, in a tone that indicated intense relief of mind; while Peter Mactavish uttered a sigh so deep that one might suppose a burden of innumerable tons weight had just been removed from his breast.
Charley had been roused from his slumbers by this last ebullition; but on being told what had caused it, he turned languidly round on his pillow and went to sleep again, while his friends departed and left him to repose.
Tom Whyte failed to find the doctor. The servant told him that her master had been suddenly called to set a broken leg that morning for a trapper who lived ten miles down the river, and on his return had found a man waiting with a horse and cariole, who carried him violently away to see his wife, who had been taken suddenly ill at a house twenty miles up the river, and so she didn’t expect him back that night.
“An’ where has ’e been took to?” inquired Tom.
She couldn’t tell; she knew it was somewhere about the White-horse Plains, but she didn’t know more than that.
“Did ’e not say w’en ’e’d be ’ome?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Oh dear!” said Tom, rubbing his long nose in great perplexity. “It’s an ’orrible case o’ sudden and onexpected pison.”