Page:Doctor Syn - A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh.djvu/32

20 into the kitchen, followed by Mrs. Waggetts and the sandy-haired Rash, that gentleman carefully shutting the door behind him.

Denis now found himself alone with young Jerk. The would-be hangman was helping himself to a thimble of rum, and politely asked the squire's son to join him; but Denis refused with a curt: "No, I don't take spirits."

"No?" replied the lad of twelve years. "Oh, you should. When I feels regular out and out, and gets fits of the morbids, you know, the sort of time when you feels you may grow up to be the hanged man and not the hangman, I always takes to myself a thimble of neat rum. Rum's the drink for Britons, Mister Cobtree. Rum's wot's made all the best sailors and hangmen in the realm."

"If you go on drinking at this rate," replied Denis, "you'll never live to hang that schoolmaster."

"Oh," answered Jerry thoughtfully, "oh, Mister Denis, if I thought there was any truth in that, I'd give it up. Yes," he went on with great emphasis, as if he were contemplating a most heroic sacrifice, "yes, I'd give up even rum to hang that schoolmaster, and it's a hanging what'll get him, and not old Mipps, the coffin knocker."

Denis laughed at his notion and crossed to the kitchen door listening. "What can they be discussing in there so solemnly?" he said, more to himself than to his