“I suppose you have seen what the papers have been saying about your supposed connection with Peace?”
“Oh, yes; I’ve seen it all. It’s all wrong. I’m quite innocent o’ this thing. Besides, it aint nothing to do with me. It aint me they mean. It’s the other man with the same name that keeps the ‘knell’ down the lane. If they wrote about me I should ’a took it up; but as they didn’t, I shall not trouble about it.”
“Glad to find you’re so clear of this nasty business; but have you heard much about the rumours here in the lane?”
“No; nothing except what there’s bin in the newspapers.”
“Ah! then I think I’ll call on the man at the ‘knell,’ and hear what he’s got to say.”
“Yes, that’ll be ’sgood a thing as you can do,” said the store dealer; and as the special passed the threshold sounds of merry cachinnation reached him from the idlers at the bar.
Trudging through the snow-slush, with pipe in mouth as an antidote to the many-flavoured, fever-charged atmosphere, the interviewer in a few minutes found himself outside the “knell.”
The proprietor having been inquired for, he was summoned from upstairs, and in about five minutes presented himself. He was a very young man. He was in his shirt sleeves.
He was short, but had good shoulders and breadth of chest, and his face, which had a puffiness betokening free application to the pewter pot, was adorned with a nose off one side of which the skin had been almost entirely scraped. A smile was as foreign to him apparently as vegetation to an iceberg.
The interviewer made no attempt to smile upon this young and promising vendor of Old Tom. He did not make another.