“Sooner be winged yourself, Ted,” said a listener, mockingly. “Sundon is the best shot and swordsman between this and London.”
“Had large practice, you see,” a third took up the tale briskly, “has us at a shameful disadvantage. Why not steal a march upon him—not wing him, but deal him a stray blow with a cudgel, or the flight of a stone, to crack his conceited pate or smash a limb? That would keep him out of our way for a week or two; teach him better manners,—be for his good in the long-run;” the speaker looked round triumphantly.
Squire Trevor was sitting, leaning back, in an arm-chair, a member of his tumultuous council, but preserving a grim silence. At the proposal his florid face darkened to purple, his red-brown eyes glared, he smote the table with his fist, and swore, with a ghastly grin, that he should like to be there to see when the barbarous stroke was dealt to his rival.
No one looking on the squire’s inflamed, distorted face could doubt that if he took vengeance into his own hand, there might be grievous danger of the rattening—the word might not exist then, but the thing was there, and in higher walks of life—passing swiftly into murder.
“Gentlemen, let me warn you,” interposed an anxious attorney, “that kidnapping on the occasion of an election is set down as a grave crime in the calendar, and is punished accordingly.”
“Who talked of kidnapping, Torney, unless it were your long-nosed, pettifogging self?” the nervous hint was angrily put down.
“Said and done, Bennet, what you wot of. But Sundon parades the town, backed by a ragged regiment of democratic dogs.”
“Not always,” was rejoined significantly. “He goes privately every time the London mail comes in to meet and receive his duns’ letters, billet-doux, and what not, into his own hands, rather than his fellow of a servant should bring them to him before his stuck-up madam of a wife. I warrant there are plenty of scores to settle unknown to her. I can see him myself walking up and down, wearing a muffler, which don’t disguise him from me, for as good as half-an-hour sometimes, in front of the inn-yard, before the coach comes in.”
“Is the mail extraordinary true to its hour?” investigated one of the conclave, curiously.
“Lord! no; how should it be, when it has to run the risk of being stopped by highwaymen at any one of the half-dozen lone bits between this and London?” replied the last speaker, in some surprise.