The Suprising Adventures of Sir Toady Lion With Those of General Napoleon Smith Part 10

Now Donald hated big dogs--they rugged and tugged his wool so; as soon therefore as he saw Caesar he took down the lea towards the island as hard as he could go. He thundered across the wooden bridge, breaking through the fleeing forces of Windy Standard, which were scattered athwart the castle island. He sprinted over the short turf by the orchard, Caesar lying off thirty yards on his flank. At the shallows by the stepping-stones Donald sheepfully took the water, and was not long in swimming to the other side, the Edam being hardly deep enough anywhere at this point to take him off his feet. In a minute more he was delightedly nuzzling his wet nose into the hand of Janet Sheepshanks, on the terrace of Windy Standard House.

"Wi beast, whaur hae ye come frae?--I declare I am _that_ glad to see ye!"

But had she known the price which had been paid for Donald's liberty, her rejoicing would quickly have given place to sorrow. It was mid-afternoon on the day of battle and defeat when Toady Lion straggled home, so wet and dirty that he could only be slapped, bathed and sent to bed--which, in the absence of his father, was felt to be an utterly inadequate punishment.

Prissy had long ago fled home with a terrible tale of battle, murder, and sudden death. But she knew nothing of her brother Hugh John, though she had nerved herself to go back to the Black Sheds, suffering grinding agonies of fear and apprehension the while, as also of reproach for deserting him in his hour of need. Mike and Peter were quietly at work in the stable, in momentary dread of being called upon to give evidence.

The Carters, Sammy and Cissy, had run straight home, and were at that moment undoubtedly smelling of arnica and slimy with vaseline.

But there was no trace of the Commander-in-Chief anywhere.

General-Field-Marshal Napoleon Smith had vanished from the face of the earth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "OH, THE BONNY LADDIE!"]

Tea-time came and went. He had been known to be absent from tea.

Supper-time arrived and overpa.s.sed, and then the whole house grew anxious. Ten o'clock came, and in the clear northern twilight all the household were scattered over the countryside seeking for him.

Midnight, and no Hugh John! Where could he be? Drowned in the Edam Water--killed by a chance blow in the great battle--or simply hiding from fear of punishment and afraid to venture home? It must have been some stranger entirely unacquainted with General Napoleon Smith who advocated the last explanation. The inmates of Windy Standard cherished no such foolish hopes.

The sun rose soon after two on as glorious a summer morning as ever shone upon the hills of the Border. As his beams overshot Brown Gattonside to the east they fell on Janet Sheepshanks. Her decent white cap was green-moulded with the moss of the woods; the drip of waterside caves had grimed it, the cobwebs of murky outhouses festooned it. Her abundant grey hair hung down in untended witch locks. She had not shut an eye nor lain down all night.

Now she leaned her head on her hands and sobbed aloud.

"Oh, the bonny laddie! Whatever will I say to his faither when he comes hame? His auldest son and the aipple o' his e'e! My certie, if the ill-set loon were to come up the road the noo, I wad thresh the very skin aff his banes! To think that he should bide awa' like this.

Oh, the dear, dear lamb that he is; and will thae auld e'en never mair rest on his bonnie face? Cauld, cauld noo it looks up frae the bottom o' some pool in the Edam Water!"

And Janet Sheepshanks, like one of the mothers in Ramah, lifted up her voice and wept with the weeping which will not be comforted; for oft-times bairns' play brings that which is not bairns' play to those who love them.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE SMOUTCHY BOYS.

General Napoleon Smith had been taken captive by the Comanche Cowboys.

Now it is fair to say in this place that they also had their side of the question. Their fathers were, in their own opinion, striving for the ancient rights of the town against an interloping Smith. Why should not they against the son of that Smith and his allies? The denunciations of the Edam Town Council were only transformed into the blows which rained down so freely upon Hugh John's bare and curly head, as he stood at bay that Sat.u.r.day morning in the corner of the dike.

"Surrender!" cried Nipper Donnan, whose father had moved that the town of Edam take the case up to the House of Lords.

"'A Smith dies but does not surrender'!" replied the son of the man who had declared his intention of fighting the matter out though it took his last copper.

In the calm atmosphere of the law-courts this was very well, and the combatants stood about an equal chance; but not so when translated into terms to suit the Black Sheds of Edam and the links of the castle island.

So the many-headed swarmed over the wall from behind; they struck down the last brave defender of privilege, and Hugh John Picton Smith was borne away to captivity.

Now there are many tongues and many peoples on the face of the earth, and doubtless the one Lord made them all. But there is one variety which appears among all nations, and commentators disagree as to what particular Power is responsible for his creation. He is the Smoutchy Boy.

This universal product of the race is indeed the chief evidence that we are lineally connected with the brutes that perish; for there is no doubt that the Smoutchy Boy is a brute among brutes. He is at once cruel and cowardly, boastful and shy, ready to strike a weaker, and equally ready to cry out when a stronger strikes him. He is not peculiar to any one cla.s.s of society. He frequents the best public-schools, and is responsible for the under-current of cruelty which ever and anon rises to the surface there and supplies a month's free copy to enterprising journals in want of a sensation for the dull season. He makes some regiments of the service a terror. He understands all about "hazing" in the navy. Happily, however, among such large collections of human beings there is generally some clear-eyed, upstanding, able-bodied, long-armed Other Product who, by way of counterpoise, has been specially created to be the defender of the oppressed, and the scourge of the Smoutchy Boy.

I have seen one such scatter a dozen Smoutchies, who were employed after their kind in stoning to death a nestful of fluffy, gaping, yellow-billed young blackbirds. I have heard the sound of his fists striking most compactly and satisfactorily against Smoutchy flesh.

Also I know the jar with which a foot stops suddenly in mid-air, as the Scourge pursues and kicks the fleeing Smoutchy--kicks him "for keeps" too.

Yet for all this Smoutchy Boy is a man and a brother. His smoutchiness generally pa.s.ses off with the callowness of hobble-de-hoyhood. The condition is indeed rather one for the doctor than for the Police Court. It is pathological rather than criminal; for when the Smoutchy is thrown for some time into the society of men of the world--drilled for instance in barrack yards, licked and clouted into shape by the regiment or the s.h.i.+p's crew, he sheds his smoutchiness from him like a garment. It is on record that Smoutchies ere now have led forlorn hopes, pierced Africa to its centre, navigated strange seas, and trodden trackless Polar snows. The worst Smoutchy of my time, the bully who, till the biceps and _tendo Achilles_ muscles hardened to their office, made life at a certain school a terror and an agony, afterwards sprang from a steamer in order to save the life of a man who had fallen overboard in a high-running sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE HEAD SMOUTCHY."]

But of all Smoutchies the worst variety is that reared in the vicinity of the small manufacturing town. He thrives on wages too early and too easily earned. Foul language, a tobacco pipe with the bowl turned down, and the rotten f.a.gends of a.s.sociation football, are the signs by which you may know him. In such a society there is always one Smoutchy who sets the fas.h.i.+on, and a crowd who imitate.

In Edam the head Smoutchy of the time was Nipper Donnan. He was the son of a fighting butcher, who in his day, and before marrying the widow of the deceased publican of the "Black Bull," had been a yet more riotous drover, and had almost met the running expenses of the Sheriff Court by his promptly paid fines.

The only things Nipper Donnan feared were the small, round, deep-set eyes of his father. The police were a sport to him. The well-brought-up children of the Grammar School trembled at his name.

The rough lads at work in the mills on the Edam Water almost wors.h.i.+pped him; for it was known that his father gave him lessons in pugilism. He sported a meerschaum pipe; a spotted handkerchief was always knotted knowingly round his throat, and a white bull-dog, with red sidelong eyes and lips drawn up at the corners, followed close at his heel.

Great in Edam and on all the banks of the Edam Water was Nipper Donnan, the King of the Smoutchies.

And it was into his hard, rough, unclean hands that our brave General Napoleon had fallen. Now Nipper had been reared in special hatred of the Smiths of Windy Standard. Mr. Picton Smith it was who, long ago at Edam Fair, as a young man, had interfered with Drover Donnan, when he was just settling to "polish off" a soft, good-natured shepherd of the hills, whom he had failed to cheat out of the price of his "blackfaces." Mr. Picton Smith it was who on the same occasion had sentenced the riotous drover to "thirty days without the option of a fine." He it was in times more recent who had been the means of getting the Black Bull shut up, upon the oft-repeated complaint of the Chief Constable.

And so all this heritage of hatred was now to be worked off on the son of the gentleman by the son of the bully. Of course it might just as well have been the other way about, for there is no absolute heredity in Smoutchydom. The butcher might easily have been the gentleman, and the landlord's son the Smoutchy bully; only to Hugh John's cost, on this occasion it happened to be the other way about.

The lads who followed Nipper Donnan were mostly humble admirers--some more cruel, some less, but sworn Smoutchies to a man, and all afraid to interfere with the fierce pleasures of their chief. Indeed, so absolute was Captain Nipper Donnan, that there never was a time when some of his band did not bear the marks of his attentions.

CHAPTER XVII.

BEFORE THE INQUISITION.

With this excursion into the natural history of the Smoutchy Boy, which perhaps ought to have come somewhat earlier in the history, we continue the tale of the adventures of General Napoleon Smith.

Beaten down by numbers, the hero lay on the ground at the corner of the butcher's parks. Nipper Donnan stood over him and held him down with his foot. They were just the right ages for bully and bullied.

Hugh John Smith was twelve, slim, and straight as an arrow; Nipper Donnan sixteen, short, hard, and thick set, with large solid hands and prominent knuckles.

"Got you at last, young prig! Now I'll do you to rights!" remarked Nipper, genially kicking Hugh John in the ribs with his hobnailed boots.

Hugh John said not a word, for he had fought till there was no more breath left in him anywhere.

"Sulky, hey?" said Nipper, with another kick in a more tender spot.

Hugh John winced. "Ah, lads, I thought that would wake the young swell up. Oh, our father is the owner of this property, is he? So nice! He owns the town, does he? Nasty pauper he is! Too poor to keep a proper carriage, but thinks us all dirt under his feet. Yaw, yaw, we aw-w so fine, we aw-w, we a-aw!"

And Nipper Donnan imitated, amid the mean obsequious laughter of his fighting tail, the erect carriage of his father's enemy, Mr. Picton Smith, as he was accustomed to stride somewhat haughtily down the High Street of Edam.

Then he came back and kicked Hugh John again.

"You wouldn't dare to do this if my father were here!" said General Napoleon, now sitting up on his elbow.

"_Your_ father, I'll show you!" shouted furiously Nipper the Tyrant.

"Who asked you to come here anyway to meddle with us? Who invited you into our parks? What business have you in our castle? Fetch him along, boys; we'll show him something that neither he nor his father know anything about. They and the likes of them used to shut up people in the castle dungeons, so they say. We are just the boys to give 'em a taste of what it is like theirselves."