“No, thank you,” said Turkey; “I have had my supper. I only came to inquire after that young rascal there.”
“Ah! you see him! There he is!” said Adam, looking towards me with an awful expression in his dead brown eyes. “Starving. No home and no supper for him! He’ll have to sleep in the hay-loft with the rats and mice, and a stray cat or two.”
Jamie put his cuffs, the perennial handkerchief of our poor little brothers, to his eyes. His fate was full of horrors. But again I thought I saw Turkey laughing in his sleeve.
“His sister is very anxious about him, Mr. Adam,” he said. “Couldn’t you let him off this once?”
“On no account. I am here in trust, and I must do my duty. The duke gives the forest in charge to me. I have got to look after it.”
I could not help thinking what a poor thing it was for a forest. All I knew of forests was from story-books, and there they were full of ever such grand trees. Adam went on--
“And if wicked boys will break down the trees--”
“I only pulled the bilberries,” interposed Jamie, in a whine which went off in a howl.
“James Duff!” said Adam, with awful authority, “I saw you myself tumble over a young larch tree, not two feet high.”
“Tut! tut! Mr. Adam! the larch tree wasn’t a baby,” said Turkey. “Let Jamie go. He couldn’t help it, you see.”
“It _was_ a baby, and it _is_ a baby,” said Adam, with a solitary twinkle in the determined dead brown of his eyes. “And I’ll have no intercession here. Transgressors must be prosecuted, as the board says. And prosecuted he shall be. He sha’n’t get out of this before school-time to-morrow morning. He shall be late, too, and I hope the master will give it him well. We must make some examples, you see, Turkey. It’s no use your saying anything. I don’t say Jamie’s a worse boy than the rest, but he’s just as bad, else how did he come to be there tumbling over my babies? Answer me that, Master Bannerman.”
He turned and fixed his eyes upon me. There was question in his mouth, but neither question nor speculation in his eyes. I could not meet the awful changeless gaze. My eyes sank before his.
“Example, Master Bannerman, is everything. If you serve my trees as this young man has done--”
The idea of James Duff being a young man!