each gripping him by an arm, were hurrying him with all speed
through the forest.
Chapter XXII. A victim of treachery.
Once more ‘King Foo-foo the First’ was roving with the tramps and
outlaws, a butt for their coarse jests and dull-witted railleries,
and sometimes the victim of small spitefulness at the hands of
Canty and Hugo when the Ruffler’s back was turned. None but Canty
and Hugo really disliked him. Some of the others liked him, and
all admired his pluck and spirit. During two or three days, Hugo,
in whose ward and charge the King was, did what he covertly could
to make the boy uncomfortable; and at night, during the customary
orgies, he amused the company by putting small indignities upon
him–always as if by accident. Twice he stepped upon the King’s
toes–accidentally–and the King, as became his royalty, was
contemptuously unconscious of it and indifferent to it; but the
third time Hugo entertained himself in that way, the King felled
him to the ground with a cudgel, to the prodigious delight of the
tribe. Hugo, consumed with anger and shame, sprang up, seized a
cudgel, and came at his small adversary in a fury. Instantly a
ring was formed around the gladiators, and the betting and
cheering began. But poor Hugo stood no chance whatever. His
frantic and lubberly ‘prentice-work found but a poor market for
itself when pitted against an arm which had been trained by the
first masters of Europe in single-stick, quarter-staff, and every
art and trick of swordsmanship. The little King stood, alert but
at graceful ease, and caught and turned aside the thick rain of
blows with a facility and precision which set the motley on-
lookers wild with admiration; and every now and then, when his
practised eye detected an opening, and a lightning-swift rap upon
Hugo’s head followed as a result, the storm of cheers and laughter
that swept the place was something wonderful to hear. At the end
of fifteen minutes, Hugo, all battered, bruised, and the target
for a pitiless bombardment of ridicule, slunk from the field; and
the unscathed hero of the fight was seized and borne aloft upon
the shoulders of the joyous rabble to the place of honour beside
the Ruffler, where with vast ceremony he was crowned King of the
Game-Cocks; his meaner title being at the same time solemnly
cancelled and annulled, and a decree of banishment from the gang
pronounced against any who should thenceforth utter it.
All attempts to make the King serviceable to the troop had failed.
He had stubbornly refused to act; moreover, he was always trying
to escape. He had been thrust into an unwatched kitchen, the
first day of his return; he not only came forth empty-handed, but
tried to rouse the housemates. He was sent out with a tinker to
help him at his work; he would not work; moreover, he threatened
the tinker with his own soldering-iron; and finally both Hugo and
the tinker found their hands full with the mere matter of keeping
his from getting away. He delivered the thunders of his royalty
upon the heads of all who hampered his liberties or tried to force
him to service. He was sent out, in Hugo’s charge, in company
with a slatternly woman and a diseased baby, to beg; but the
result was not encouraging–he declined to plead for the
mendicants, or be a party to their cause in any way.
Thus several days went by; and the miseries of this tramping life,
and the weariness and sordidness and meanness and vulgarity of it,
became gradually and steadily so intolerable to the captive that
he began at last to feel that his release from the hermit’s knife
must prove only a temporary respite from death, at best.
But at night, in his dreams, these things were forgotten, and he
was on his throne, and master again. This, of course, intensified
the sufferings of the awakening–so the mortifications of each
succeeding morning of the few that passed between his return to
bondage and the combat with Hugo, grew bitterer and bitterer, and
harder and harder to bear.
The morning after that combat, Hugo got up with a heart filled