CHAPTER 16

Wherein the prince neither bawls nor bellows

Jemmy felt a surge of the creeps.

Run for it? he wondered. Instead, he began to burrow out of sight under the loose heap of potatoes. "Remember," he whispered to the prince, "it's me they're after, not you. Tell 'em we split up. Tell 'em I swam the river."

Prince Brat merely looked at him.

The voices outside boomed.

"Stand and deliver, I said!"

"And I heard you," exclaimed Captain Nips. "Deliver what? Potatoes? Scurvy rascals! Help yourselves."

"Hang your potatoes!" roared Hold-Your-Nose Billy. "Deliver us some information and you can be off. We're after two runaway apprentices."

"Apprentice highwaymen?" Captain Nips scoffed.

"Our affair. Girl with a bear said she saw 'em streakin' for the river. You carryin' passengers?"

Jemmy pulled the iron kettle over his head.

A coach door was yanked open, and Jemmy could hear Cutwater's muffled cackle.

"Got one! The whipping boy, it is! Where's your master, eh?"

Jemmy held his breath. He had no reason to believe that the prince wouldn't betray him again.

There came a stiff pause.

And then Prince Brat said, "Swam the river."

By then Hold-Your-Nose Billy had ripped open the opposite coach door. Even through the kettle Jemmy imagined he could smell garlic.

"Swimmed the river! Faw! He'd need scales and fins."

Hardly a moment later, the kettle was grabbed off and Jemmy's head stood exposed.

"Here's the potato we're after!" Hold-Your-Nose Billy roared gleefully.

Jemmy and the prince were yanked out of the coach, and the big outlaw shouted to Captain Nips, "Throw me down your horsewhip, and drive on!"

Hanging on to each boy by the scruff of the neck, the highwaymen scrambled out of sight below the embankment.

Hold-Your-Nose Billy looked angry enough to throttle Jemmy on the spot.

"Tricked me, did you!" he bellowed. "Flummoxed me with your fancy quill-scratchin'!"

The game's up, Jemmy thought. He's tumbled that the ransom note ain't worth scat. But, trying to look as innocent as possible, he replied, "Sir?"

"A gold sack or two would have satisfied me and Cutwater," snarled the hairy outlaw. "Greedy ain't our middle name. But you! Raising the ante to a great cartload! Reckoned to slow us down, didn't you? It would be easier to drag around a dead horse! If we ain't lightfooted, we're caught. That was your scheme!"

What a pair of fools, Jemmy thought. That hadn't been his scheme at all! "You've got it all wrong" he declared. "I swear it!"

"Aye, enough plunder to burden us directly to the gallows, eh?" Hold-Your-Nose Billy continued. "Well, here's a whipping you won't never forget!"

He snapped Captain Nip's whip in the air to get the feel of it.

"Here's the whipping boy," Cutwater put in. "You said it'll go powerful worse for us if we thrash the prince himself."

Hold-Your-Nose Billy nodded sharply. Cutwater upturned the prince, holding him by the ankles in the air. "Go to it, Billy."

Jemmy finally found his voice. "Lay down the whip," he commanded with a princely air. "Don't you have an ounce of sense between you?"

"Hold your gab!"

"Simpletons! You can just fill your pockets with plunder and be lightfooted as ever," Jemmy declared.

"Nobody flummoxes Hold-Your-Nose Billy and gets away with it!"

The whip snapped across the prince's back.

Jemmy held his breath. He knew what it felt like. He saw that Prince Brat had set his jaws, just as Jemmy had always done—and not a sound escaped his lips.

"Harder!" Cutwater advised. "You didn't raise a peep out of him."

The big man let fly again.

"He must have a hide like an elephant," said Cutwater. "He don't feel a thing."

"He'll feel this!" Hold-Your-Nose Billy thundered, and the leather whistled through the air. The prince's jacket was being shredded.

"Bawl out!" Jemmy shouted. He'd dreamed of seeing the prince whipped, but now that it was happening he found no satisfaction in it. "Holler and cry out! I won't tell anyone!"

But Prince Brat only girded himself for the next blow.

From the top of the embankment came an outraged voice. Betsy and her dancing bear stood there.

"Ruffian!" she cried out. "What are you doing to that poor boy?"

"No business of yours," snarled Cutwater.

"Stop it!"

But Hold-Your-Nose Billy raised the whip again. The next thing Jemmy knew, the girl had slipped the rope from around the bear's neck.

"Sic 'em, Petunia! Go get 'em!"