Hugh gave a short laugh, and thrusting his hand into his breast, produced one of the handbills, soiled and dirty from lying out of doors all night, which he laid upon the secretary’s desk after flattening it upon his knee, and smoothing out the wrinkles with his heavy palm.
‘Nothing but that, master. It fell into good hands, you see.’
‘What is this!’ said Gashford, turning it over with an air of perfectly natural surprise. ‘Where did you get it from, my good fellow; what does it mean? I don’t understand this at all.’
A little disconcerted by this reception, Hugh looked from the secretary to Dennis, who had risen and was standing at the table too, observing the stranger by stealth, and seeming to derive the utmost satisfaction from his manners and appearance. Considering himself silently appealed to by this action, Mr Dennis shook his head thrice, as if to say of Gashford, ‘No. He don’t know anything at all about it. I know he don’t. I’ll take my oath he don’t;’ and hiding his profile from Hugh with one long end of his frowzy neckerchief, nodded and chuckled behind this screen in extreme approval of the secretary’s proceedings.
‘It tells the man that finds it, to come here, don’t it?’ asked Hugh. ‘I’m no scholar, myself, but I showed it to a friend, and he said it did.’
‘It certainly does,’ said Gashford, opening his eyes to their utmost width; ‘really this is the most remarkable circumstance I have ever known. How did you come by this piece of paper, my good friend?’
‘Muster Gashford,’ wheezed the hangman under his breath, ‘agin’ all Newgate!’
Whether Hugh heard him, or saw by his manner that he was being played upon, or perceived the secretary’s drift of himself, he came in his blunt way to the point at once.
‘Here!’ he said, stretching out his hand and taking it back; ‘never mind the bill, or what it says, or what it don’t say. You don’t know anything about it, master,—no more do I,—no more does he,’ glancing at Dennis. ‘None of us know what it means, or where it comes from: there’s an end of that. Now I want to make one against the Catholics, I’m a No-Popery man, and ready to be sworn in. That’s what I’ve come here for.’
‘Put him down on the roll, Muster Gashford,’ said Dennis approvingly. ‘That’s the way to go to work—right to the end at once, and no palaver.’