“I forget.”
“Whose son was he?” said Coote, turning with an air of desperation to the other.
“Richard the Third’s,” said the latter.
Coote mused, and inwardly repeated a string of names.
“Doesn’t sound right,” said he. “Are you sure, Dick?”
“Who else could it be?” said the young gentleman addressed as Dick, whose real name was Richardson.
“Hanged if I know,” said the unhappy Coote, proceeding to write an R and a 3 on his thumb-nail with a pencil. “It doesn’t look right I believe because your own name’s Richardson, you think everybody else is Richard’s son too.”
And the perpetrator of this very mild joke bent his head over his learned thumb-nail, and frowned.
It was a point of honour at Mountjoy always to punish a joke summarily, whether good, bad, or indifferent. For a short time, consequently, the paternity of Edward the Fifth was lost sight of, as was also Coote himself, in the performance of the duty which devolved on Richardson and his companion.
This matter of business being at last satisfactorily settled, and Tom, the driver, who had considerately pulled up by the road-side during the “negotiations,” being ordered to “forge ahead,” the party returned to its former attitude of gloomy anticipation.