CHAPTER XVI.

“A COWARD’S TRICK.”

“Wait a minute, Aaron,” shouted Tubbs, a minute after his son had disappeared. “I’ll come and help you with that bird.”

Throwing aside his tools and scrooping back his wooden stool, the old cobbler vanished in his turn into the back regions of the establishment.

“I wish between them they’d be a little quicker,” sighed Fay, who regretted the delay in the winding up of this transaction.

She was terribly afraid that the boys, finding no outlet for the warlike intentions they had been nursing so zealously, would relieve their disappointment by indulging in a little civil war amongst themselves of a singularly uncivil type. “I do wish they wouldn’t be so slow,” she repeated.

“I suppose they _will_ bring it,” said Phoena.

“I say, are you hatching the thrush?” shouted Jack.

“All in good time, young gentlemen,” came the cool answer.

“Look here,” called Phil, going to the inner door, “we’re not going to stand this any more; if you’re going to humbug us about that bird it will be the worse for you.”

“If you don’t bring up that bird by the time I’ve counted fifty,” said Andrew, “we’ll make hay of your shop.”

“Come on, Aaron,” Tubbs was next heard to say--he spoke in aggressively loud tones--“don’t do to keep little squeakers too long without their pap and their playthings, so best see to them now.”

“Little squeakers, indeed,” cried Phil, “he ought to be knocked into the middle of next week for daring to speak like that;” whilst Andrew remarked, with a withering sneer at Gaston and Hubert, “That’s the sort of remark we must expect if we go about with babies.”

“I’m not a baby,” cried Hubert, flaring up with indignation, “a baby’s a horrid little thing that always seems crying out of its mouth, instead of its eyes.”

At that moment Jonas appeared with the cage, cabbage-leaf and all tucked under his arm. Aaron, with a broad grin on his face, followed close on his parent’s heels.

“Now give me the bird,” said Andrew, stepping forward, “let me have it, just as it is in its cage, do you hear?”

“Certainly, my young sir, by all manner of means,” said the cobbler. “You mind, Aaron, he says he’ll have it ‘_just as it is in its cage_!’”

And as Aaron nodded assent, Jonas, with much show of deference, placed the wicker cage in Andrew’s out-stretched hands.

The children clustered round Andrew at once, eagerly peering into the cage.

“Let Phoena have the first peep,” said Di, and all agreed thereto.

“Oh! thank you,” she said, “but we won’t open the cage here, he shall be set free out of doors, poor darling; you see----”

Her voice changed suddenly into an angry scream. “Oh! you wicked, wicked man, the poor darling’s dead, quite dead!”

Yes, there was no doubt of it! With its head hanging limply on one side, so that his beak just ruffled the pretty speckled plumage of his breast--such a still motionless breast it was--and with his little claws, looking like tiny stiffened

hooks, the poor thrush lay on its back on the floor of the cage, just a small heap of feathers.

“Do yer still think he was worth the money?” enquired Jonas.

Aaron burst into a loud laugh, moved to the display of this unseemly merriment by the blank disappointment depicted on all the children’s faces. But he didn’t laugh long.

For Andrew, who was standing nearest to him, struck him such a blow across his shoulders, that Aaron, unsteady on his legs at the best of times, stumbled, tried to save himself, and finally fell with a crash to the floor.

At the same moment, a handful of leather bootlaces whistled round Andrew’s ears, their brass tags making themselves felt unmercifully on his neck and face, for the cobbler was wielding this original scourge with a will. But, instead of attacking the cobbler, as most other boys would have done, Andrew continued his assault upon Aaron, kicking at him with all his might as he lay prone on the floor.

“Shut up, Andrew,” cried Phil and Jack, in one breath.

Furious as they were at the way in which they had been tricked, they would have scorned to strike such a poor creature as Aaron.

“How can you be such a cad as to touch such a poor chap?” they said.

“Hope you like yer dead bird,” came in a muffled, jeering voice from Aaron, who had evidently more spirit than strength, “hurry ’ome, I would, and make a pie of him.”

Then, as he felt himself released from his oppressor, he went on, “Ah! that’s better now, hold him off, young gentlemen.” For Jack and Phil had pinioned Andrew from behind, and were dragging him back. In his rage, Andrew was kicking out right and left, so that had his fellow knights been wearing any visible armour, he would certainly have inflicted many dints upon it.

His cousins, however, were well used to schoolboys’ mills and stuck to their guns. Even Gaston and Hubert, at a wink from them, had risen to the occasion. Each had seized one of Andrew’s feet and was hanging on to it, like little terriers to a rat.

But the girls were pale and tearful. Phoena was absorbed by her grief for the thrush’s death, but Fay and Di were ashamed of the whole business.

“You had no right to deceive us about the bird,” said Fay to the cobbler, who was now calmly resuming his cobbling, leaving the “young uns” to square up accounts by themselves; “you ought to have told us it was dead, when we first asked you about it.”

“You ought to have asked if it was alive, if you were particular on that point,” retorted Jonas, catching the end of his long thread between his teeth, and suiting it to the length he desired.

“Of course, we supposed it was.”

“Never should suppose anything without knowing it for sartin.”

“But we’d seen it alive so lately,” began Phoena.

“Well, and if you had happened to have come an hour earlier, you’d have seen it alive then. ’Twasn’t my fault, it died.”

“No, but it was your fault not to tell us that it was dead,” said Di.

“Now, blow me, if I think it was,” cried Jonas, “a civil question gets a civil answer, that’s what I’ve always learnt. And if you’d spoken civil to me, first go off--them boys, I mean--I’d have spoken civil too, and acted straight with you. But, as it is, I’ve given you all a lesson in manners, and not charged over highly for it either. And now I’ll ask you to clear out of my place; quick march, I say.”

“You’re a werry rude old man,” cried Hubert, waxing bold; but Andrew broke in, his tongue being the only member left free, he meant to use it for a final onslaught.

“Now, my good man,” he began, intending to be dignified and opening his mouth extraordinarily wide, after a manner peculiar to himself, “now my goo----”

His mouth shut with a snap, amidst the hearty laughter of all around him. For with an aim so direct that it could not err, and with such promptness that no interference would have been possible, Jonas had thrown a big lump of cobbler’s wax straight into Andrew’s pompously parted jaws.

And so this episode, which the boys had fondly hoped might end perhaps in a little bloodshed, was concluded by this comical finale, which provoked all the spectators from sober Faith down to little Gaston to ungovernable merriment.

Only Andrew looked as black as the offending missile itself.

“And as that last attention wasn’t reckoned for in the bargain, you can have your money back again,” laughed the old cobbler, producing the half-crown, “and my best wishes along with it; that when you next try to set the world to rights, you’ll make a better job of it. And, as for you,” nodding at Andrew, “don’t you pick out a lame dog again to show your strength on. Coward’s trick, I call that.”

“Ay, ay,” echoed Aaron’s voice from the background, where he had disappeared, “a coward’s trick, and no mistake.”

So coward was the last sound that pursued the young knights as they retreated in doubtful good order from the field of this, their maiden essay in redressing wrong.