But, “Not I!” the one who had carried it answered contemptuously. “It’s swooned, like enough. And I’d to stop it shrieking, hadn’t I? Let the lass look to it.”
Bess took it but reluctantly—with an ill grace and no look of tenderness or pity. She was of those women who love no children but their own, and sometimes do not love their own. While she sprinkled water on the poor little face and rubbed the small hands, Walterson found his voice.
“What folly—what cursed folly is this?” he cried, his words vibrating with rage. “What have we to do with the child or your vengeance, or this d——d folly—that you should bring the hunt upon us? We were snug here.”
“And ain’t we snug now?” Lunt, the man who had carried the child, asked.
“Snug? We’ll be snug behind bars in twenty-four hours!” Walterson rejoined, his voice rising almost to a scream, “if that child is Squire Clyne’s child!”
“Oh, he’s that right enough, master,” Giles, the other man, struck in. A kind of ferocious irony was natural to him.
“Then you’ll have the whole country on us before noon to-morrow!” Walterson retorted. “I tell you he’ll follow you and track you and find you, if he follows you to hell’s gate! I know the man.”
“So do I,” said Thistlewood coolly. “And I say the same.”
“Yet,” Giles retorted impudently, “you’ve got a neck as well as another.”
“You can leave my neck out of the question,” Thistlewood replied. “And me!” And he turned his back on them contemptuously.