CHAPTER XVI.
THE SMOUTCHY BOYS.
General Napoleon Smith had been taken captive by the Comanche Cowboys.Now it is fair to say in this place that they also had their side ofthe question. Their fathers were, in their own opinion, striving forthe ancient rights of the town against an interloping Smith. Whyshould not they against the son of that Smith and his allies? Thedenunciations of the Edam Town Council were only transformed into theblows which rained down so freely upon Hugh John's bare and curlyhead, as he stood at bay that Saturday morning in the corner of thedike.
"Surrender!" cried Nipper Donnan, whose father had moved that the townof Edam take the case up to the House of Lords.
"'A Smith dies but does not surrender'!" replied the son of the manwho had declared his intention of fighting the matter out though ittook his last copper.
In the calm atmosphere of the law-courts this was very well, and thecombatants stood about an equal chance; but not so when translatedinto terms to suit the Black Sheds of Edam and the links of the castleisland.
So the many-headed swarmed over the wall from behind; they struck downthe last brave defender of privilege, and Hugh John Picton Smith wasborne away to captivity.
Now there are many tongues and many peoples on the face of the earth,and doubtless the one Lord made them all. But there is one varietywhich appears among all nations, and commentators disagree as to whatparticular Power is responsible for his creation. He is the SmoutchyBoy.
This universal product of the race is indeed the chief evidence thatwe are lineally connected with the brutes that perish; for there is nodoubt that the Smoutchy Boy is a brute among brutes. He is at oncecruel and cowardly, boastful and shy, ready to strike a weaker, andequally ready to cry out when a stronger strikes him. He is notpeculiar to any one class of society. He frequents the bestpublic-schools, and is responsible for the under-current of crueltywhich ever and anon rises to the surface there and supplies a month'sfree copy to enterprising journals in want of a sensation for the dullseason. He makes some regiments of the service a terror. Heunderstands all about "hazing" in the navy. Happily, however, amongsuch large collections of human beings there is generally someclear-eyed, upstanding, able-bodied, long-armed Other Product who, byway of counterpoise, has been specially created to be the defender ofthe oppressed, and the scourge of the Smoutchy Boy.
I have seen one such scatter a dozen Smoutchies, who were employedafter their kind in stoning to death a nestful of fluffy, gaping,yellow-billed young blackbirds. I have heard the sound of his fistsstriking most compactly and satisfactorily against Smoutchy flesh.Also I know the jar with which a foot stops suddenly in mid-air, asthe Scourge pursues and kicks the fleeing Smoutchy--kicks him "forkeeps" too.
Yet for all this Smoutchy Boy is a man and a brother. His smoutchinessgenerally passes off with the callowness of hobble-de-hoyhood. Thecondition is indeed rather one for the doctor than for the PoliceCourt. It is pathological rather than criminal; for when the Smoutchyis thrown for some time into the society of men of the world--drilledfor instance in barrack yards, licked and clouted into shape by theregiment or the ship's crew, he sheds his smoutchiness from him like agarment. It is on record that Smoutchies ere now have led forlornhopes, pierced Africa to its centre, navigated strange seas, andtrodden trackless Polar snows. The worst Smoutchy of my time, thebully who, till the biceps and _tendo Achilles_ muscles hardened totheir office, made life at a certain school a terror and an agony,afterwards sprang from a steamer in order to save the life of a manwho had fallen overboard in a high-running sea.
"THE HEAD SMOUTCHY."]
But of all Smoutchies the worst variety is that reared in the vicinityof the small manufacturing town. He thrives on wages too early and tooeasily earned. Foul language, a tobacco pipe with the bowl turneddown, and the rotten fagends of Association football, are the signs bywhich you may know him. In such a society there is always one Smoutchywho sets the fashion, and a crowd who imitate.
In Edam the head Smoutchy of the time was Nipper Donnan. He was theson of a fighting butcher, who in his day, and before marrying thewidow of the deceased publican of the "Black Bull," had been a yetmore riotous drover, and had almost met the running expenses of theSheriff Court by his promptly paid fines.
The only things Nipper Donnan feared were the small, round, deep-seteyes of his father. The police were a sport to him. Thewell-brought-up children of the Grammar School trembled at his name.The rough lads at work in the mills on the Edam Water almostworshipped him; for it was known that his father gave him lessons inpugilism. He sported a meerschaum pipe; a spotted handkerchief wasalways knotted knowingly round his throat, and a white bull-dog, withred sidelong eyes and lips drawn up at the corners, followed close athis heel.
Great in Edam and on all the banks of the Edam Water was NipperDonnan, the King of the Smoutchies.
And it was into his hard, rough, unclean hands that our brave GeneralNapoleon had fallen. Now Nipper had been reared in special hatred ofthe Smiths of Windy Standard. Mr. Picton Smith it was who, long ago atEdam Fair, as a young man, had interfered with Drover Donnan, when hewas just settling to "polish off" a soft, good-natured shepherd of thehills, whom he had failed to cheat out of the price of his"blackfaces." Mr. Picton Smith it was who on the same occasion hadsentenced the riotous drover to "thirty days without the option of afine." He it was in times more recent who had been the means ofgetting the Black Bull shut up, upon the oft-repeated complaint of theChief Constable.
And so all this heritage of hatred was now to be worked off on the sonof the gentleman by the son of the bully. Of course it might just aswell have been the other way about, for there is no absolute heredityin Smoutchydom. The butcher might easily have been the gentleman, andthe landlord's son the Smoutchy bully; only to Hugh John's cost, onthis occasion it happened to be the other way about.
The lads who followed Nipper Donnan were mostly humble admirers--somemore cruel, some less, but sworn Smoutchies to a man, and all afraidto interfere with the fierce pleasures of their chief. Indeed, soabsolute was Captain Nipper Donnan, that there never was a time whensome of his band did not bear the marks of his attentions.