Free Brother Dusty-Feet by Rosemary Sutcliff

his spangled tights and tumbled for the little crowd they had just gathered, until Jasper had collected the price of supper in his hat.
    But already old friends had begun to come across each other, and Nicky, coming back with a pail ofwater from the nearby stream, said, ‘Zackary Hawkins is here, but his man is laid up with boils all over.’
    ‘Ye saints and sinners! That’s ill fortune!’ said Master Pennifeather. ‘What does friend Zackary mean to do about it?’
    Nicky shrugged. ‘Oh, carry on as usual and risk it.’
    And then, seeing Hugh’s bewilderment, he explained that Zackary Hawkins was a quack doctor, and that quack doctors were not allowed in the great fairs because the real doctors had managed to get a law passed forbidding them. So when they
did
set up their stands at a fair they always had a man whose job was to keep a look-out for the stewards and law-officers, and give warning if any came that way. Because Zackary Hawkins’s man was laid up with boils, he would have to risk being taken unawares by the stewards of the Fair, which was a nuisance.
    ‘Oh, well, nothing venture, nothing gain,
I
always say,’ said Ben Bunsell, with his mouth full. ‘Daresay we’ll be able to do a bit of watch-dogging for him, from time to time.’
    When supper was over they lay down to sleep under the tilt-cart, all but Jonathan, that is. He sat up until midnight to see that nobody stole Saffronilla or the costume baskets, and then he woke Master Pennifeather to take his place, and just before dawn Master Pennifeather woke Benjamin. It would be like that all the time they stayed there, for a fair was not at all an honest place.
    It was all so strange and exciting, that first night, that for a long time Hugh could not go to sleep at all. He lay listening to the night sounds of the great fairground and watching, between the spokes of the nearest wheel, the dark shape of Jonathan sittingbeside the remains of the fire, until at last everything got blurred together and he was not sure which were camp-fires and which were stars. And then quite suddenly it was morning and the sun was slanting through the scarlet wheels of the tilt-cart, and the fairground was growing noisier every moment, as it awoke to the new day.
    All that morning they were very busy putting up the stage and getting everything ready for the performance; and in the afternoon came the play itself, and a great crowd to watch it. And when the Players counted out the silver in Benjamin’s hat on the sharing table, they found they were quite rich – rich enough even to spend a few pence at the sideshows if they felt like it, and
still
have enough to pay their Fair Dues when the time came for paying them.
    It was quite early in the evening when the sharingout was over, and so Jonathan, Nicky and Jasper, with Hugh holding firmly to a strap through Argos’s collar, all set out to see the fun of the fair, while Ben Bunsell and Master Pennifeather stayed with Saffronilla and the tilt-cart on the understanding that it would be their turn next evening.
    Before they set out, Jonathan said: ‘Now, look here, Dusty; if you don’t stick to the rest of us as close as a limpet, you’ll get mislaid in five seconds in this crowd, and it won’t be too easy to find you again.’
    So Hugh stuck very close indeed, and before long he was in such a glorious maze and muddle, what with the noise and crowds and colour, the swirl and sweep and sparkle all around him, that he felt sure it would not take him anything like five seconds to get mislaid, if he once lost sight of Jonathan. Theywandered up and down the crowded, twisty lanes between the booths, stopping to buy an orange or a handful of gilt gingerbread, or watch a dancing bear or a Cornish wrestler or a pedlar spreading out his pack of ribands and necklaces and embroidered sleeves, trying their luck at sideshows, greeting old friends and glaring at old enemies. Presently, when Nicky had won a pewter pot at the archery