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He, little Will, he will never be one like Goodman Sadler, Gammer's son-in-law, with a lean, long nose, and a body slipping flatlike through a crack of the door. And here Dad bends to tweak the ear of Will who would laugh noisily if it hurt twice as badly. It makes him feel himself a man to wink back those tears of pain. "A busy afternoon this, Mary," says Dad.
The chief laughed, and so did everybody else who heard the story. The policeman was directed to return to Mrs. Gammer's cottage later in the day, and serve her with an order requiring her to give up the cock immediately. But when he handed Mrs. Gammer the official paper, she laughed in his face.
'Tis lingering in the lane after dark with that gawky country sweetheart has given her the fever that her betters have been having since the Avon come over bank. A wet autumn is more to be feared than Gammer's witches. Poor luck it is the lubberfolk aren't after the girl in truth; a slattern maid she is, her hearth unswept and house-door always open and the cream ever a-chill.
Hamnet has a fist, too, and has thrashed the butcher's son down by the Rother Market, though the butcher's son is nine. Here Hamnet nudges Will. What is this he is saying? About Gammer, his very own grandame? "Ben't no witches," mutters Hamnet to Will. "Schoolmaster says so. Says the like of Gammer's talk is naught but women's tales."
So, armed with the turk's-head brush, the policeman ascended Mrs. Gammer's small, steep staircase. When he reached her bedroom, he poked into every cranny and corner with the handle of his brush. But no cock was to be found. He descended the stairs, and stood again in the little kitchen. A savory smell of cooking arose from a stew-pan on the fire. "Where's the critter gone to?" he demanded.
And like the old familiar stories we put on the shelf, gloating the while over the unproven treasures between the lids of the new, straightway Gammer's tales are forgot. And above the wind, as it whips scurries of snow around the corners, pipes Will's voice as they trudge home. But his pipings, his catechisings, now are concerned with this unknown world summed up in the magic term, "The Players."
One no longer feels afraid, while the memory of Gammer's tales is alluring. Will remembers, too, that greens from the forest were ordered sent to the Sadlers for the making of garlands for the Town Hall revels. Small Willy Shakespeare slipped off from home that afternoon. Reaching the Sadlers, he stopped on the threshold abashed.
"And I should like to know what you call yourself, policeman or no policeman, to be chasing a poor harmless critter across 'em blazing commons on a day like this! You want to go and poke him down from my tester-bed, do you? Well, you can just go back and tell the magistrates as Mrs. Gammer's got him, and if they want him they must come for him themselves."
Will Shakespeare, with heart a-still, clutches at Gammer's gown as there follows a crash against the oaken panels. But as the door bursts open, it is Hamnet, head-first, sprawling into the room, the pippins preceding him over the floor. "It were ahind me, breathin' hoarse, on the cellar stairs," whimpers Hamnet, gathering himself to his knees, his fist burrowing into his eyes.
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