CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
DAYGO DESCRIBES HORRORS.
"Er-her! Going to school! Yer!" Vince, who had some books under his arm, felt a peculiar twitching in the nerves, as he turned sharply upon the heavy-looking lad who had spoken the above words, with the prologue and epilogue formed of jeering laughs, which sounded something like the combinations placed there to represent them.
The speaker was the son of the Jemmy Carnach who was, as the Doctor said, a martyr to indigestion--a refined way of expressing his intense devotion to lobsters, the red armour of which molluscs could be seen scattered in every direction about his cottage door, and at the foot of the cliff beyond.
As Jemmy Carnach had thought proper to keep up family names in old-fashioned style, he had had his son christened James, like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather--which was as far as Carnach could trace.

The result was a little confusing, the Crag island not being big enough for two Jemmy Carnachs.

The fishermen, however, got over the difficulty by always calling the father Jemmy and his son Young 'un; but this did not suit Vince and Mike, with whom there had always been a feud, the fisherman's lad having constantly displayed an intense hatred, in his plebeian way, for the young representatives of the patricians on the isle.

The manners in which he had shown this, from very early times, were many; and had taken the forms of watching till the companions were below cliffs, and then stealing to the top and dislodging stones, that they might roll down upon their heads; filling his pockets with the thin, sharply ground, flat oyster-shells to be found among the beach pebbles--a peculiarly cutting kind of weapon--and at every opportunity sending them skimming at one or other of the lads; making holes in their boat, when they had one--being strongly suspected of cutting two adrift, so that they were swept away, and never heard of again; and in divers other ways showing his dislike or hatred-- displaying an animus which had become intensified since Mike had called in Vince's help to put a stop to raids and forays upon the old manor orchard when the apples, pears and plums were getting ripe, the result being a good beating with tough oak saplings.
Not that this stopped the plundering incursions, for Carnach junior told the two lads, and probably believed, as an inhabitant of the island, that he had as good a right to the fruit as they.
Of course the many assaults and insults dealt out by Carnach junior--for he was prolific in unpleasant words and jeers, whenever the companions came within hearing--had results in the shape of reprisals.

Vince was not going to see Mike Ladelle's ear bleeding from a cut produced by a forcibly propelled oyster-shell, without making an attack upon the young human catapult; and Mike's wrath naturally boiled over upon seeing a piece of rock pushed off the edge of the cliff, and fall within a foot of where Vince was lying on the sand at the foot.