“He did.”
“Ah, well, you marked him. But you get one of Nadin’s boys. You’ll not take him easy.”
CHAPTER XVII
Clement did not let the grass grow under his feet. An hour later he was rattling over the stony pavements and through the crowded streets of the busy town, which had grown in a short hundred years from something little more than a village, to be the second centre of wealth and population, of poverty and crime, within the seas; a centre on which the eye of Government rested with unwinking vigilance, for without a voice in Parliament and with half of its citizens deprived of civic rights—since half were Nonconformists—it was the focus of all the discontent in the country. In Manchester, if anywhere, flourished the agitation against the Test Acts and the movement for Reform. Thence had started the famous Blanketeers, there six years before had taken place the Peterloo massacre. Thence as by the million filaments of some great web was roused or calmed the vast industrial world of Lancashire. The thunder of the power-loom that had created it, the roar of the laden drays that shook it, deafened the wondering stranger, but more formidable and momentous than either, had he known it, was the half-heard murmur of an underworld striving to be free.
Clement had never visited the cotton-town before, and on a more commonplace errand he might have allowed himself to be daunted by a turmoil and bustle as new to him as it was uncongenial. But with his mind set on one thing, he heeded his surroundings only as they threatened to balk his aim, and he had himself driven directly to the Police Office, over which the notorious Nadin had so lately presided that for most people it still went by his name. Fearless, resolute, and not too scrupulous, the man had through twenty troublous years combated the forces alike of disorder and of liberty; and before London had yet acquired an efficient police, he had gathered round him a body of men equal at least to the Bow Street Runners. He had passed, but his methods survived; and half an hour after Clement had entered the office he issued from it accompanied by a hard-bitten, sharp-eyed man in a tall beaver hat and a long wide-skirted coat.
“The Apple Tree? Oh, the Apple Tree’s on the square,” he informed Clement. “And Jerry Stott? No harm in him, sir, either. He’ll speak when he sees me.”
“You don’t think we need another man?”
“There’s one following. No use to go in a bunch. He’ll watch the front, and we’ll go in by the yard. Got a barker, sir?”
“Yes.”
“’Fraid so. Well, don’t use it—show it if you like. Law’s law, and a live dog’s worth more than its hide. Ay, that’s Chetham’s. Queer old place, and—sharp’s the word, here we are,” as they turned off Long Mill Gate, and entered the yard of an old-fashioned house, over the door of which hung the sign of an apple-tree. The place was quiet, in comparison with the street they had left, and “Here’s Jerry,” the officer added, as they espied a young fellow, who in a corner of the enclosure was striving to raise to his shoulder a truss of hay. He ceased his efforts when he saw them.