“He may come back of his own accord,” said the third man.
“You hold your breath till he does,” kindly remarked the major.
It was a doleful sort of conference; and the high opinion of Barnaby Vernon’s, alias Jack Chills’s, capacity in their peculiar line which that trio entertained was expressed in language decidedly too powerful to be reported.
CHAPTER II
AN UNEXPECTED DUCKING
Just about the time that Barnaby Vernon sat down to his first breakfast at his hotel, old Gershom Todderley, the fat and crusty miller of Ogleport, stood, with his hands in his pockets, halfway between the dam and the sawmill, jerking wheezy, angry sentences at the head of his Irish foreman.
“Mister Murphy, I say. Those rascally boys again. They’ve put up another spring-board. Twenty times I’ve forbidden ’em to bathe in my pond. Saw it off, sir. Close up. They’ll be here again this afternoon. So’ll I, sir. Saw it off. We’ll see, sir.”
And the wheezy miller put on all the dignity that he knew how, as he turned away towards his own breakfast, although the only reply from the dusty-looking Mr. Murphy was a subdued and doubtful:
“’Dade, an’ I’ll do that same, the day, sir.”