“No—I cannot eat.”
“Cook it then, an’ don’t be selfish. Other people can ait, though ye can’t. It’ll kape yer mind employed—an I’ll want somethin’ to cheer me up whin I come back.”
Pat Flinders left the tent abruptly, and poor Fred went about the preparation of supper in a half mechanical way, wondering what his comrade meant by his strange conduct.
Pat’s meaning was soon made plain, that night, to a dozen or so of his friends, whom he visited personally and induced to accompany him to a sequestered dell in an out-of-the-way thicket where the moonbeams struggled through the branches and drew a lovely pale-blue pattern on the green-sward.
“My frinds,” he said, in a low, mysterious voice, “I know that ivery mother’s son of ye is ready to fight for poor Tom Brixton to-morrow, if the wust comes to the wust. Now, it has occurred to my chum Westly an’ me, that it would be better, safer, and surer to buy him up, than to fight for him, an’ as I know some o’ you fellers has dug up more goold than you knows well what to do wid, an’ you’ve all got liberal hearts—lastewise ye should have, if ye haven’t—I propose, an’ second the resolootion, that we make up some five hundred pounds betune us, an’ presint it to Bully Gashford as a mark of our estaim—if he’ll on’y give us up the kay o’ the prison, put Patrick Flinders, Esquire, sintry over it, an’ then go to slape till breakfast-time tomorry mornin’.”
This plan was at once agreed to, for five hundred pounds was not a large sum to be made up by men who—some of them at least—had nearly made “their pile”—by which they meant their fortune, while the liberality of heart with which they had been credited was not wanting. Having settled a few details, this singular meeting broke up, and Patrick Flinders—acting as the secretary, treasurer, and executive committee—went off, with a bag of golden nuggets and unbounded self-confidence, to transact the business.
Chapter Six.
Gashford was not quite so ready to accept Flinders’s offer as that enthusiast had expected. The bully seemed to be in a strangely unusual mood, too—a mood which at first the Irishman thought favourable to his cause.