<h2><SPAN name="chap03"></SPAN>Chapter III.</h2>
<p class="pfirst"><span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was
a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my
little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the
window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges
and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spiders’ webs; hanging itself
from twig to twig and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy,
and the marsh mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing
people to our village—a direction which they never accepted, for they
never came there—was invisible to me until I was quite close under it.
Then, as I looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed
conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.</p>
<p>The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my
running at everything, everything seemed to run at me. This was very
disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes and banks came bursting at
me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with
somebody else’s pork pie! Stop him!” The cattle came upon me with
like suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils,
“Halloa, young thief!” One black ox, with a white cravat
on,—who even had to my awakened conscience something of a clerical
air,—fixed me so obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head
round in such an accusatory manner as I moved round, that I blubbered out to
him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t for myself I took
it!” Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of smoke out of his
nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and a flourish of his tail.</p>
<p>All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast I went, I
couldn’t warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted, as the iron
was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet. I knew my way to the
Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there on a Sunday with Joe, and
Joe, sitting on an old gun, had told me that when I was ’prentice to him,
regularly bound, we would have such Larks there! However, in the confusion of
the mist, I found myself at last too far to the right, and consequently had to
try back along the river-side, on the bank of loose stones above the mud and
the stakes that staked the tide out. Making my way along here with all
despatch, I had just crossed a ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery,
and had just scrambled up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man
sitting before me. His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and was
nodding forward, heavy with sleep.</p>
<p>I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his breakfast, in that
unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and touched him on the shoulder. He
instantly jumped up, and it was not the same man, but another man!</p>
<p>And yet this man was dressed in coarse grey, too, and had a great iron on his
leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was everything that the other man
was; except that he had not the same face, and had a flat broad-brimmed
low-crowned felt hat on. All this I saw in a moment, for I had only a moment to
see it in: he swore an oath at me, made a hit at me,—it was a round weak
blow that missed me and almost knocked himself down, for it made him
stumble,—and then he ran into the mist, stumbling twice as he went, and I
lost him.</p>
<p>“It’s the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I
identified him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver, too, if I had
known where it was.</p>
<p>I was soon at the Battery after that, and there was the right
man,—hugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all night
left off hugging and limping,—waiting for me. He was awfully cold, to be
sure. I half expected to see him drop down before my face and die of deadly
cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry too, that when I handed him the file
and he laid it down on the grass, it occurred to me he would have tried to eat
it, if he had not seen my bundle. He did not turn me upside down this time to
get at what I had, but left me right side upwards while I opened the bundle and
emptied my pockets.</p>
<p>“What’s in the bottle, boy?” said he.</p>
<p>“Brandy,” said I.</p>
<p>He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious
manner,—more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent
hurry, than a man who was eating it,—but he left off to take some of the
liquor. He shivered all the while so violently, that it was quite as much as he
could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth, without biting it
off.</p>
<p>“I think you have got the ague,” said I.</p>
<p>“I’m much of your opinion, boy,” said he.</p>
<p>“It’s bad about here,” I told him. “You’ve been
lying out on the meshes, and they’re dreadful aguish. Rheumatic
too.”</p>
<p>“I’ll eat my breakfast afore they’re the death of me,”
said he. “I’d do that, if I was going to be strung up to that there
gallows as there is over there, directly afterwards. I’ll beat the
shivers so far, I’ll bet you.”</p>
<p>He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all at once:
staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all round us, and often
stopping—even stopping his jaws—to listen. Some real or fancied
sound, some clink upon the river or breathing of beast upon the marsh, now gave
him a start, and he said, suddenly,—</p>
<p>“You’re not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”</p>
<p>“No, sir! No!”</p>
<p>“Nor giv’ no one the office to follow you?”</p>
<p>“No!”</p>
<p>“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You’d be but a fierce
young hound indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched
warmint hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint
is!”</p>
<p>Something clicked in his throat as if he had works in him like a clock, and was
going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough sleeve over his eyes.</p>
<p>Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down upon the
pie, I made bold to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.”</p>
<p>“Did you speak?”</p>
<p>“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”</p>
<p>“Thankee, my boy. I do.”</p>
<p>I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a
decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the man’s.
The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or
rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked
sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in
every direction of somebody’s coming to take the pie away. He was
altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably I
thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his
jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.</p>
<p>“I am afraid you won’t leave any of it for him,” said I,
timidly; after a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness of
making the remark. “There’s no more to be got where that came
from.” It was the certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer the
hint.</p>
<p>“Leave any for him? Who’s him?” said my friend, stopping in
his crunching of pie-crust.</p>
<p>“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”</p>
<p>“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh.
“Him? Yes, yes! <i>He</i> don’t want no wittles.”</p>
<p>“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.</p>
<p>The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and the
greatest surprise.</p>
<p>“Looked? When?”</p>
<p>“Just now.”</p>
<p>“Where?”</p>
<p>“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him
nodding asleep, and thought it was you.”</p>
<p>He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his first
idea about cutting my throat had revived.</p>
<p>“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained,
trembling; “and—and”—I was very anxious to put this
delicately—“and with—the same reason for wanting to borrow a
file. Didn’t you hear the cannon last night?”</p>
<p>“Then there <i>was</i> firing!” he said to himself.</p>
<p>“I wonder you shouldn’t have been sure of that,” I returned,
“for we heard it up at home, and that’s farther away, and we were
shut in besides.”</p>
<p>“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man’s alone on these
flats, with a light head and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he
hears nothin’ all night, but guns firing, and voices calling. Hears? He
sees the soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the torches carried
afore, closing in round him. Hears his number called, hears himself challenged,
hears the rattle of the muskets, hears the orders ‘Make ready! Present!
Cover him steady, men!’ and is laid hands on—and there’s
nothin’! Why, if I see one pursuing party last night—coming up in
order, Damn ’em, with their tramp, tramp—I see a hundred. And as to
firing! Why, I see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was broad
day,—But this man”; he had said all the rest, as if he had
forgotten my being there; “did you notice anything in him?”</p>
<p>“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew
I knew.</p>
<p>“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly,
with the flat of his hand.</p>
<p>“Yes, there!”</p>
<p>“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the
breast of his grey jacket. “Show me the way he went. I’ll pull him
down, like a bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us hold of the
file, boy.”</p>
<p>I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man, and he
looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank wet grass, filing
at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or minding his own leg, which had
an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which he handled as roughly as if it
had no more feeling in it than the file. I was very much afraid of him again,
now that he had worked himself into this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very
much afraid of keeping away from home any longer. I told him I must go, but he
took no notice, so I thought the best thing I could do was to slip off. The
last I saw of him, his head was bent over his knee and he was working hard at
his fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at it and at his leg. The last I
heard of him, I stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still going.</p>
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