BOOK THE FOURTH: A TURNING
Chapter 1: Setting Traps (continued)
Bradley turned away his haggard face for a few moments, and then
said, tearing up a tuft of grass:
'Damn him!'
'Hooroar!' cried Riderhood. 'Does you credit! Hooroar! I cry
chorus to the T'otherest.'
'What turn,' said Bradley, with an effort at self-repression that
forced him to wipe his face, 'did his insolence take to-day?'
'It took the turn,' answered Riderhood, with sullen ferocity, 'of
hoping as I was getting ready to be hanged.'
'Let him look to that,' cried Bradley. 'Let him look to that! It will
be bad for him when men he has injured, and at whom he has
jeered, are thinking of getting hanged. Let HIM get ready for HIS
fate, when that comes about. There was more meaning in what he
said than he knew of, or he wouldn't have had brains enough to say
it. Let him look to it; let him look to it! When men he has
wronged, and on whom he has bestowed his insolence, are getting
ready to be hanged, there is a death-bell ringing. And not for
them.'
Riderhood, looking fixedly at him, gradually arose from his
recumbent posture while the schoolmaster said these words with
the utmost concentration of rage and hatred. So, when the words
were all spoken, he too kneeled on one knee on the grass, and the
two men looked at one another.
'Oh!' said Riderhood, very deliberately spitting out the grass he had
been chewing. 'Then, I make out, T'otherest, as he is a-going to
her?'
'He left London,' answered Bradley, 'yesterday. I have hardly a
doubt, this time, that at last he is going to her.'
'You ain't sure, then?'
'I am as sure here,' said Bradley, with a clutch at the breast of his
coarse shirt, 'as if it was written there;' with a blow or a stab at the
sky.
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