“Young man, young man!” he said warningly, “I begin to be suspicious that, after all, I may be misplacing my confidence.”
He looked banefully into his hat, where it stood rim upwards on the floor; then, suddenly overwrought, kicked it fiercely across the room. The action seemed to restore him to complete urbanity. He smiled.
“So perish all Buggins’s enemies!” he said loftily; “and hail the grand climacteric!”
He pinned me, like a live butterfly, to the wall behind me with a fixed and penetrating gaze.
“What would you say,” he said quietly, “to an Insurance against Brigandage, available to all travelling in Sicily or the Balkans, and realizable” (his watchfulness was intense) “on the receipt, at the head-offices in the Shetland Islands, of a nose, ear, or other organ, attested, under urgency, by the nearest consul, to be the personal property of the applicant desiring a ransom?”
He paused significantly. “I should say,” I responded drivellingly, “that, as a feat of pure inspiration, it—it takes the cake.”
“Ah!” He shouted it, and sprang to his feet joyously. “You are the man for me! You justify my confidence, as the returns justified Buggins’s daring conception. Would you believe it: within the first few months, bushels of noses were received at the head-offices, every one of which Buggins had no difficulty in proving to be false! But, hush! stay!—there was to be a higher flight!”
He had been pacing riotously up and down. Now he flounced to a stop before me, and held me once more with his glittering eye.
“It took the form,” he whispered, “of a Purgatory Mutual, on the Tontine principle, the last out to take the pool!”
I rose, trembling, to my feet, as he burst into a violent fit of laughter.