But he was not to be silenced.
“He’ll sell you!” he cried. “He’ll sell you! He’ll give you fair words and you think you can fool him. But when he comes to know there’s a reward out, and what he’ll suffer if he is found hiding us, and when he knows that all the country is up—and for this child they’d hang us on the nearest tree—he’ll give us up and you too. Though you do think you have bewitched him. And so I tell all here!” he added passionately.
With a dark look, “Stow it, my lad,” she said, as he paused for want of breath. “And leave Tyson to me.”
But the men who had listened to the debate looked something startled. They glanced at one another, and at last Thistlewood spoke.
“Is this Tyson,” he asked, “the man at whose house you said we should be better than here, my girl?”
“That’s him,” Bess answered curtly.
“Well, it seems to me that you ought to tell us a bit more. I don’t want to be sold.”
“I am of that way of thinking myself, captain,” Lunt growled. “If the man has no finger between the jamb and the door, you can’t be sure that he won’t shut it. No, curse me, you can’t! There’s other Olivers besides him who has sold a round dozen of us to Government. I’ll slit the throat of the first police spy that comes in my way!”
“And yet you trust me!” the girl flung at him, her eyes scornful. To her they all, all seemed cowards.
“Ay, but you are a woman,” Giles answered. “And though I’m not saying there’s no Polly Peachums, I’ve not come across them. Treat a maid fair and she’ll treat you fair, that’s the common way of it. She’ll not stretch you, for anything short of another wench. But a man! He’s here and there and nowhere.”