The four looked at Jeremy without moving.
Jeremy came close to them and said, “You’re a lot of dirty cads.”
“Dirty cads to touch my sister, a girl who couldn’t touch you.”
Still no answer. Only one, the smallest, jumped off the wall and ran to the gate behind Jeremy.
“I’m not afraid of you,” said Jeremy (he was—terribly afraid). “I wouldn’t be afraid of a lot of dirty sneaks like you are—to hit a girl!”
“And we’ll go wherever we like. It isn’t your field, and we’ve just as much right to it as you have!”
He turned to go, and faced the boy at the gate. The other three had now climbed off the wall, and he was surrounded. He had never, since the night with the sea-captain, been in so perilous a situation. He thought that they would murder him, and then hide his body under the manure—they looked quite capable of it. And in some strange way this farm was so completely shut off from the outside world, the house watched so silently, the wall was so high. And he was very small indeed compared with the biggest of the four. No, he did not feel very happy.
Nothing could be more terrifying than their silence; but, if they were silent, he could be silent too, so he just stood there and said nothing.
“What are you going to do about it?” suddenly asked the biggest of the four.
“Do about what?” he replied, his voice trembling in spite of himself; simply, as it seemed to him, from the noisy beating of his heart.
“I can’t do much,” Jeremy said, “when there are four of you, but I’ll fight the one my own size.”
That hero, grinning, moved forward to Jeremy, but the one who had already spoken broke out:
“Let him out. We don’t want him. . . . And don’t you come back again!” he suddenly shouted.
“I will,” Jeremy shouted in return, “if I want to!” And then, I regret to say, took to his heels and ran pell-mell down the road.
Now this was an open declaration of war and not lightly to be disregarded. Jeremy said not a word of it to anyone, not even to the wide-eyed Mary who had been waiting in a panic of terror under the oak tree, like the lady in Carpaccio’s picture of St. George and the Dragon, longing for her true knight to return, all “bloody and tumbled,” to quote Miss Jane Porter’s “Thaddeus.” He was not bloody nor was he tumbled, but he was serious-minded and preoccupied.