“That man,” he declared solemnly to Johnny, “ought to have his brain knocked out”; and he conveyed by subtle intimations to the boy that that was the course he would favour were he himself standing in Johnny’s shoes. “One dark night,” he had roared with a dreadful glare in his eyes, “with a neat heavy stick!”
The Flynns also consulted a cabman who lodged in the house. His legal qualifications appeared to lie in the fact that he had driven the private coach of a major general whose son, now a fruit farmer in British Columbia, had once been entered for the bar. The cabman was a very positive and informative cabman. “List and learn,” he would say, “list and learn”: and he would regale Johnny, or any one else, with an oration to which you might listen as hard as you liked but from which you could not learn. He was husky, with a thick red neck and the cheek bones of a horse. Having perused the agreement with one eye judicially cocked, the other being screened by a drooping lid adorned with a glowing nodule, he carefully refolded the folios and returned them to the boy:
“Any judge—who was up to snuff—would impound that dockyment.”
“What’s that?”
“They would impound it,” repeated the cabman smiling wryly.
“But what’s impound it? What for?”
“I tell you it would be impounded, that dockyment would,” asseverated the cabman. Once more he took the papers from Johnny, opened them out, reflected upon them and returned them again without a word. Catechism notwithstanding, the oracle remained impregnably mystifying.
The boy continued to save his pocket money. His mother went about her work with a grim air, having returned the draft agreement to the lawyers with an ungracious acceptance of the terms.
One April evening Johnny went home to an empty room; Pomona was out. He prepared his tea and afterwards sat reading “Tales of a Grandfather.” That was a book if anybody wanted a book! When darkness came he descended the stairs to enquire of the shoemaker’s wife about Pomony, he was anxious. The shoemaker’s wife was absent too and it was late when she returned accompanied by his mother.
Pomona’s hour had come—they had taken her to the workhouse—only just in time—a little boy—they were both all right—he was an uncle.