“I wager, on sunrise tomorrow morning, there shall be some sore teeth in the chief-house!” said the Marquis, with a chuckle.
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VI
HOW THEY BURIED
BOBBY-THE-CLOCK
CHAPTER VI
HOW THEY BURIED BOBBY-THE-CLOCK
“ N ame of a name of a name of a name of a dog!” said the Marquis through his teeth. “What’s this that we have arrived at?”
We stood in the bush at the edge of the little clearing and looked across a small space of muddy earth, planted with clothes-props, into a wide, doorless open door. It was night, and you could see little of the building itself—only a long, low outline against the stars and that big oblong of orange light.
Inside, about a score of men were sitting on rough benches nailed to the wall. They all had glasses or tin pannikins in their hands, and they were drinking, slowly and quietly and without any joviality or talk. Their eyes were fixed in one direction; it seemed that they were looking at something beyond our range of view.
Inside the room some one was singing; a rollicking, vulgar music-hall song with a great deal of “beer” and “booze” in it and not a little bad language, apparently thrown in by the singer. Some of the song was certainly funny, though with a coarse kind of fun; and, all in all, it was not the sort of thing that most men would have listened to with faces like tombstones—especially the rough-looking crowd that was seated there on the benches round the wall. But there was never a smile on a face. They listened and they drank, grave, unmoved and gloomy.
The Marquis used some more curious expressions, apparently translated from the French.