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"Drat them children!" he muttered; but kept on his way, and, drawing near, demanded to know what business brought them so far from home at such an hour. "I might ask you the same question," retorted 'Beida. "Funny time, isn't it? to start diggin' potatoes? An' before now I've always notice you use a visgy for the job. Yet you can't be plantin not at this season "
In another moment there would have been mischief; but the Whip, as he stood wiping his mouth, saw the danger and ran in. He struck the visgy out of the child's grasp, set his foot on it, and with an open-handed cuff sent him floundering into a sand-heap. "Nice boy, that!" said somebody, and the whole company laughed as they walked their horses slowly out of the hollow.
Uncle Issy, after revolving the question for another fifteen seconds, produced it in this attractive form "Old Zeb, bein' called Zeb, why did 'ee call Young Zeb, Zeb?" Old Zeb ceased to knock the clods about, descended the path, and leaning on his visgy began to contemplate the opposite slope of the coombe, as if the answer were written, in letters hard to decipher, along the hill-side.
Very cautiously, with one hand feeling the wall, and in the other carrying his boots, lest he should wake the Penhaligons, he stole downstairs to his parlour. The day being Sunday, he could not dare to risk outraging public opinion by carrying shovel or visgy through the open streets.
"You devils!" He tottered forward with the visgy lifted it was all he could manage at Squire Moyle. The old man let out an oath, and the curve of his whip-thong took the boy across the eyes and blinded him for a moment, but did not stop him. The grey horse swerved, and half-wheeled, exposing his flank.
He heard shouts of laughter, caught a glimpse of blue sky, felt a grip of fingers on his throat, and smelt the verminous odour of the dead cub, as the Whip thrust the bloody mess against his face and neck. Then the grip relaxed, and it seemed to him, amid dead silence Taffy sprang to his feet, spitting sand and fury. "You you devils!" He caught up the visgy and stood, daring all to come on.
A knife lay between his wide-planted feet, and a visgy close behind him on a heap of disturbed sand. The boy came on them from the eastward, and his shadow fell across the hollow. "Hullo!" said one of the riders, looking up. It was Squire Moyle himself. "Here's the new Passon's boy!" All the riders looked up. The Whip looked up too, and turned to the old Squire with a wider grin than before.
The next day but one after Christmas dawned deliciously in Porthlooe, bright with virginal sunshine, and made tender by the breath of the Gulf Stream. Uncle Issy, passing up the road at nine o'clock, halted by the Cherokee to pass a word with its proprietor, who presented the very antipodes of a bird's-eye view, as he knocked about the crumbling clods with his visgy at the top of the slope.
A week later, in the twilight of a May evening, John was digging potatoes on the slope above the harbour, when he heard away up the first bend of the river the crew of the Hannah Hands brigantine singing as they weighed anchor. He listened for a minute, stuck his visgy into the soil slipped on his coat, and trudged down to the ferry-slip. Two years passed without word of him.
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