“Why look’e, young gentleman,” said Toby, “when a man keeps himself so very ex-clusive as I have done, and by that means has a snug house over his head with nobody prying and smelling about it, it’s rather a startling thing to have the honour of a wisit from a young gentleman (however respectable and pleasant a person he may be to play cards with at conweniency) circumstanced as you are.”
“Especially when the exclusive young man has got a friend stopping with him that’s arrived sooner than was expected from foreign parts, and is too modest to want to be presented to the Judges on his return,” added Mr. Kags.
There was a short silence, after which Toby Crackit, seeming to abandon as hopeless any further effort to maintain his usual devil-may-care swagger, turned to Chitling and said—
“When was Fagin took then?”
“Just at dinner-time—two o’clock this afternoon,” was the reply. “Charley and I made our lucky up the wash’us chimney, and Bolter got into the empty water-butt, head downwards, but his legs was so precious long that they stuck out at the top, and so they took him too.”
“And Bet?”
“Poor Bet! She went to see the body, to speak to who it was,” replied Chitling, his countenance falling more and more, “and went off mad, screaming and raving, and beating her head against the boards, so they put a strait weskut on her and took her to the hospital—and there she is.”
“Wot’s come of young Bates?” demanded Kags.
“He hung about, not to come over here afore dark, but he’ll be here soon,” replied Chitling. “There’s nowhere else to go to now, for the people at the Cripples are all in custody, and the bar of the ken—I went up there and saw it with my own eyes—is filled with traps.”
“This is a smash,” observed Toby, biting his lips. “There’s more than one will go with this.”