The Surprising Adventures of Sir Toady Lion with Those of General Napoleon Smith

Now, this was his mode of inviting an explanation, but Prissy was far too wise to offer one. She merely thanked him and went on her way towards the castle.

"Don't go near thim ruins till after Saturday, when we will clean every dirty spalpeen out of the place like thunder on the mountains," cried Mike, who, like some other people, loved to round off his sentences with sounding expressions without troubling himself much as to whether they fitted the place or not.

"Thank you!" cried Prissy over her shoulder, with a sweet and grateful, but quite uninforming smile.

She continued on her way till Mike was out of sight, without altering her course from the straight road to the wooden bridge which led into the town of Edam. Then at the edge of the hazel copse she came upon a small footpath which meandered through lush grass meadows and patches of the greater willow herb to the Castle of Windy Standard. The willow herb flourished in glorious red-purple masses on the ancient masonry of the outer defences, for it is a plant which loves above all things the disintegrating lime of old buildings from which its crown of blossom shoots up three or four, or it may be even six feet.

She skirted the moat, green with the leaves of pond-weed floating like small veined eggs on the surface. From the sluggish water at the side, iris and bog-bean stood nobly up, and white-lilies floated on the still surface in lordly pride among the humbler wrack and scum of duckweed and water buttercup. The light chrome heads of "Go-to-bed-John" flaunted on the dryer bank beyond.

Prissy eyed all these treasures with anxious glances.

"I want just dreadfully to gather you," she said. "I hope all this warring and battling will be over before you have done blooming, you nice waterside things."

And indeed I agree with her, for there is nothing much nicer in the world than wayside and riverside flowers – except the little children who play among them; and nothing sweeter than a bairns' daisy-chain, save the fingers which weave it, and the neck about which it hangs.

Prissy had arrived within sight of the castle now. She saw the flaunting of the red republican flag which in staggery capitals condemned her parent to instant dissolution. She stood a moment with the basket on her arm in front of the great ruined gate. A sentry was pacing to and fro there. Bob Hetherington was his name, and there were other lads and boys lounging and pretending to smoke in the deep embrasures and recesses of the walls. Clearly the castle was occupied in force by the enemy.

Prissy stopped somewhat embarrassed, and set down her basket that she might have a good look, and think what she was to do next. As she did so she caught the eye of Nosie Cuthbertson, a youth whom Nipper Donnan permitted in his corps because his father had a terrier which was undoubtedly the best ratter in Edam. But the privilege of association with such a distinguished dog was dear at the price, for no meaner nor more "ill-set" youth than Nosie Cuthbertson cumbered honest Bordershire soil. Nosie was seated trying to smoke dry dock-leaf wrapped in newspaper without being sick, when his eye caught the trim little figure on the opposite side of the moat.

"Hey, boys!" he cried, "here's the Smith lass. Let's go and hit her!"

Now Master Nosie had not been prominent on the great day of the battle of the Black Sheds, but he felt instinctively that against a solitary girl he had at last some chance to assert himself. So he threw away his paper cigar, and ran round the broken causeway to the place where Prissy was standing.

"If you please, sir," began Prissy sweetly, "I've come to ask you not to fight any more. It isn't right, you know, and God will be angry."

Nosie Cuthbertson did not at all attend to the appeal so gently and courteously made to him. He only caught Prissy by the hand, and began twisting her wrist and squeezing her slender fingers till the joints ground against each other, and Prissy bit her lips and was ready to cry with pain.

"Oh, please don't, sir!" she pleaded softly, trying to smile as at a famous jest. "I came because I wanted to speak to your captain, and I've brought a lot of nice things for you all. I think you will be sure to like them."

"Humbug," cried Nosie Cuthbertson, performing another yet more painful twist, "the basket's ours anyway. I captured it. Hey, Bob, catch hold of this chuck, while I give the girl toko– I'll teach her to come spying here about our castle!"

CHAPTER XXXI

PRISSY'S PICNIC

BUT just at this moment an important personage stalked through the great broken-down doorway by which kings and princes most magnificent had once entered the ancient Castle of the Lorraines. He stood a moment or two on the threshold behind Nosie Cuthbertson, silently contemplating his courageous doings.

Presently a little stifled cry escaped from Prissy, caused by one of Nosie's refinements in torture, which consisted in separating her fingers and pulling two in one direction and two in the other. Nosie was a youth of parts and promise, who had already proceeded some distance on his way to the gallows.

But the Important Personage, who was no other than Nipper Donnan himself, did not long remain quiescent. He advanced suddenly, seized Nosie Cuthbertson by the scruff of the neck, kicked him several times severely, tweaked his ear till it looked as if it had been constructed of the best india-rubber, and then ended by tumbling him into the moat, where he disappeared as noiselessly as if he had fallen into green syrup.

"Now, what's all this?" cried the lordly Nipper, whose doings among his own no man dared to question, for reasons connected with health. At the first sight of him Bob Hetherington had quietly shouldered his musket, and begun pacing up and down with his nose in the air, as if he had never so much as dreamed of going near Prissy's basket.

"What's all this, I say – you?" demanded his captain.

"I don't know any bloomin' thing about it – " began Bob, with whom ignorance, if not honesty, was certainly the best policy.

"Salute!" roared his officer; "don't you know enough to salute when you speak to me? Want to get knocked endways?"

Sulkily Bob Hetherington obeyed.

"Well?" said Nipper Donnan, somewhat appeased by the appearance of Nosie Cuthbertson as he scrambled up the bank, with the green scum of duckweed clinging all over him. He was shaking his head and muttering anathemas, declaring what his father would do to Nipper Donnan, when within his heart he knew that first of all something very painful would be done to himself by that able-bodied relative as soon as ever he showed face at home.

"This girl she come to the drawbridge and hollered – that's all I know!" said the sentry, disassociating himself from any trouble as completely as possible. Bob felt that under the circumstances it was very distinctly folly to be wise. "I don't know what she hollered, but Nosie he runs an' begins twisting her arm, and then the girl she begins to holler again!"

"I didn't mean to," said Prissy tremulously, "but he was hurting so dreadfully."

"Come here, you!" shouted Nipper to the retiring Nosie. Whereupon that young gentleman, hearing the dreadful voice of his chief officer, and being at the time on the right side of the moat, did not pause to respond, but promptly took to his heels in the direction of the town.

"Run after him and bring him back, two of you fellows! Don't dare come back without him!" cried Nipper, and at his word two big boys detached themselves from the doorposts in which the guard was kept, and dashed after the deserter.

"Oh, don't hurt him – perhaps he didn't mean it!" cried the universally sympathetic Prissy. "He didn't hurt me much after all, and it is quite better now anyway."

Nipper Donnan could, as we know, be as cruel as anybody, but he liked to keep both the theory and practice of terror in his own hands. Besides, some possible far-off fragrance from another life stirred in him when he saw the slim girlish figure of Prissy Smith, clad all in white with a large sun-bonnet edged with pale green, standing on the bank and appealing to him with eyes different from any he had ever seen. He wanted, he knew not why, to kick Nosie Cuthbertson – kick him much harder than he had done before he saw whom he was tormenting. He had never particularly noticed any one's eyes before. He had thought vaguely that every one had the same kind of eyes.

"Well, what do you want?" he said gruffly. For with Nipper and his class emotion or shamefacedness of any kind always in the first instance produces additional dourness.

Prissy smiled upon him – a glad, confident smile. She was the daughter of one war chief, the sister of another, and she knew that it is always best and simplest to treat only with principals.

"You know that I didn't come to spy or find out anything, don't you?" she said; "only I was so sorry to think you were fighting with each other, when the Bible tells us to love one another. Why can't we all be nice together? I'm sure Hugh John would if you would – "

"Gammon – this is our castle," said Nipper Donnan sullenly, "my father he says so. Everybody says so. Your father has no right to it."

"Well, but – " replied Prissy, with woman's gentle wit avoiding all discussion of the bone of contention, "I'm sure you would let us come here and have picnics and things. And you could come too, and play at soldiers and marching and drills – all without fighting to hurt."

"Fighting is the best fun!" snarled Nipper; "besides, 'twasn't us that begun it."

"Then," answered Prissy, "wouldn't it be all the nicer of you if you were to stop first?"

But this Nipper Donnan could not be expected to understand. A diversion was caused at this moment by the return of the two swift footmen, with the culprit Nosie between them, doing the frog's march, and having his own experiences as to what arm-twisting meant.

"Cast him into the deepest dungeon beneath the castle moat!" thundered the brigand chief.

"Can't," said the elder of the two captors, one Joe Craig, the son of the Carlisle carrier; "can't – we couldn't get him out again if we did!"

"Well then," – returned the great chief, swiftly deciding upon an alternative plan, as if he had thought about it from the first, "chuck him down anywhere on the stones, and get Fat Sandy to sit on him."

Joe Craig obediently saluted, and presently sundry moans and sounds of exhausted breath indicated that Nosie Cuthbertson was being subjected to hydraulic pressure by the unseen tormentor whom Nipper Donnan had called Fat Sandy. Prissy felt that nothing she could say would for the present lessen Master Nosie's griefs, so she went on to accomplish her purpose by other means.

"If you please, Mr. Captain," she said politely, "I thought you would like to taste our nice sheep's-head-pie. Janet makes it all out of her own head. Besides, there are some dee-licious fruits which I have brought you; and if you will let me come in, I will make you some lovely tea?"

Nipper Donnan considered, and at last shook his head.

"I don't know," he said, "'tisn't regular. How do we know that you aren't a spy?"

"You could bind my eyes with a napkin, and – "

"That's the thing!" cried several of Nipper's followers, who scented something to eat, and who knew that the commissariat was the weak point in the defences of the Castle of Windy Standard under the Consulship of Donnan.