There advanced to the bailiff’s table and flung one leg over it, a huge red man. He was red-haired, red-faced, red-whiskered, red as a red setter, and on his head was a cap of red foxskin. The table creaked beneath his weight, and the spread-out of his buckskin-covered thigh hid half the width of it. An old coat, of a wide and flaring cut, seemed to add even more to his bulk, and it was spotted with stains of vivid orange, apparently the eating of some acid. His accent, as he spoke, was not the curt and grudging accent of those parts.
“So we’ve got William Huggins’s successor, Matthew,” he said cheerfully; “have you seen him yet?”
As Matthew Moon moved slightly again, the “....ING” of the proclamation showed.
“Nor I. Well, we must entertain him. King’s Excise or not, William Huggins was always companionable. A fair show of the lads here. You’ll be at the meeting to-night?”
The merchant grunted. Presently he said, “What sort o’ man does Sally say he is?”
“I don’t know. Sally’s out of heart, with Jim and Haigh all these months in York. Small wonder.”
Matthew Moon frowned again, and was silent for a minute. Then he looked up and said, “Ye said entertainment, Arthur. Supervisors must take their chance o’ that. Don’t start taking it heady. Tongues tie knots that teeth can’t loose, and we don’t want the speech and confession of Arthur Monjoy yet. Two in York’s enough. Shall I be at the meeting? Yes; but don’t go and take things too headstrong.”
The big man laughed. “If I remember, they wanted to set the dogs on Huggins at first; none of that,” he said; and as the merchant moved away the whole word “COINING” showed on the stone pillar.
Under the bow-windowed shops and houses the vendors of tinware and early market-stuff and wanded chairs and wooden vessels were knocking up their light booths; but no wares were yet displayed, for in Horwick the cloth market takes precedence of all else, and it is a fine of forty shillings, all but a penny, to as much as ask the price of a piece of cloth before the first stroke of the bell in the little round-topped turret of the Piece Hall. Among these minor merchants the women moved and gossipped. The waspish wife of Pim o’ Cuddy, the Wadsworth verger, declared that she would not live with her husband another day--but she had left him at regular intervals any time this twenty years. Fat, gap-toothed Dooina Benn, who mashed herbs and distilled simples and rendered services to her sex that Mrs. Pim o’ Cuddy was now little likely ever to stand in need of, exchanged tidings of the December’s asthmas and lumbagos, and declared that she had scarce an ounce of gentian left to her name. They, too, spoke of the new resident excise officer, but their voices fell as Sally Northrop passed. Sally managed the “Cross Pipes” during her husband’s absence. Jim Northrop and Will Haigh should have been back from York months ago; and on a January afternoon, during Jim’s detention, Dooina had been sent for to Sally in haste--the innkeeper’s wife had been brought to bed of a son. Not far from the women, Mish Murgatroyd held in a leash his choicest specimen of dogflesh, a currant-eyed, brindled brute, heavy as a man, heavily muzzled and formidable. Curs and terriers and mastiffs, noses to the ground, threaded in and out across the market-place invisible scents and tracks of their own, and a group of Back o’ th’ Mooiners looked admiringly at the animal.