“How should I know?” returned the other. “He had ’em stowed away somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect.”
“I wish,” said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, “that I had ’em here.”
“Two one pound notes, or friends?”
“Two one pound notes. I’d sell all the friends I ever had for one, and think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says—?”
“So he says,” resumed the convict I had recognised,—“it was all said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the Dock-yard,—‘You’re a-going to be discharged?’ Yes, I was. Would I find out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.”
“More fool you,” growled the other. “I’d have spent ’em on a Man, in wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed nothing of you?”
“Not a ha’porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.”
“And was that—Honour!—the only time you worked out, in this part of the country?”
“The only time.”
“What might have been your opinion of the place?”