“Been dancing, Bill?” he inquired, languidly. “It’s dangerous at your time of life. Here, some one get him a drink!”
One of the men brought him a “stiff” whisky, and Bill, clutching it, tossed it off, and drew a long breath.
“Didn’t know as I was alive till I tasted it,” he remarked, as coolly as his shortness of breath would permit him. “Don’t offer me another, or I shall take it.”
Another was brought, and he disposed of it, the group waiting with sympathetic patience.
“What’s the shindy, Bill?” asked Varley, as the empty tumbler was taken away from him.
“Oh, only a little affair with some Dog’s Ear gentry,” said the postman, drawing his sleeve across his mouth this time. “I s’pose you thought you was never going to get your letters, eh, boys, seeing as I’m a matter of six hours late? Seems to me as things is coming to a pretty pass when Dog’s Ear takes to makin’ a target of her majesty’s mail.”
The listeners growled.
“Spin it out, Bill!” exhorted one.
“It’s this way,” he said, preparing himself for the narration by expectorating on the floor and pulling down his coat-cuffs. “I was a-riding up the slope of the Green Bank, when I see a couple o’ men crouching behind a tree. There was somethin’ so unornary in their way o’ looking around and fingerin’ their irons that it struck me they weren’t holding a Bible class, and I steered the mare behind a bush and took stock of ’em. They couldn’t see me, ’cause I was on the lee o’ the hill. It was evident that they was a-waitin’ for some one, and, as there ain’t any one as passes that way ’cepting myself, I concluded that they was laying for me. I led the mare a matter o’ a quarter of a mile off the track, and tied her up; then I crept round to the clump o’ trees where them two was a-waitin’ as innocent as babes, and I heard them talking as plain as you hear me. ‘He’s late,’ says one—that long-legged son of a sweep they calls Simon—‘and I never knowed Bill late afore,’ which was highly complimentary. ‘No,’ says the other—I don’t know him, but he’s Dog’s Ear, too. ‘Are you sure the swag’s on him?’ ‘Almost certain,’ says Simon. ‘It’s about time for that girl o’ theirs to be sending coin or presents.’”
“Esmeralda!” exclaimed one of the listeners.