Shrill chorus. “Yes!”

“Might you be acquainted, learned governor,” said Riderhood, “with a person of about your own heighth and breadth, and wot ’ud pull down in a scale about your own weight, answering to a name sounding summat like t’otherest?”

With a desperation in him that made him perfectly quiet, though his jaw was heavily squared; with his eyes upon Riderhood; and with traces of quickened breathing in his nostrils; the schoolmaster replied, in a suppressed voice, after a pause: “I think I know the man you mean.”

“I thought you knowed the man I mean, learned governor. I want the man.”

With a half glance around him at his pupils, Bradley returned:

“Do you suppose he is here?”