Mr. Hardie groaned aloud, but there was no help for it. Skinner was on sale: and must be bought.
He took out two notes for five hundred pounds each, and laid them on the table, after taking their numbers.
Skinner's eyes glistened: “Thank you, sir,” said he. He put them in his pocket. Then he said quietly, “Now you have taken the numbers, sir; so I'll trouble you for a line to make me safe against the criminal law. You are a deep one; you might say I robbed you.”
“That is a very unworthy suspicion, Skinner, and a childish one.”
“Oh, it is diamond cut diamond. A single line, sir, just to say that in return for his faithful services, you have given Noah Skinner two notes for L. 500, Nos. 1084 and 85.”
“With all my heart—on your giving me a receipt for them.”
It was Skinner's turn to hesitate. After reflecting, however, on all the possible consequences, he saw nothing to fear; so he consented.
The business completed, a magic change took place in the little clerk. “Now we are friends again, sir: and I'll give you a piece of advice. Mind your eye with Mr. Alfred: he is down on us.”
“What do you mean?” inquired Mr. Hardie with ill-disguised anxiety.
“I'll tell you, sir. He met me this morning: and says he to me, 'Skinner, old boy, I want to speak a word to you.' He puts his hands on my shoulder, and turns me round, and says he all at one time, 'The fourteen thousand pounds!' You might have knocked me down with a feather. And he looked me through like a gimlet mind ye. 'Come now,' says he, 'you see I know all; make a clean breast of it.' So then I saw he didn't know all, and I brazened up a bit: told him I hadn't a notion what he meant. 'Oh yes, I did,' he said, 'Captain Dodd's fourteen thousand pounds! It had passed through my hands.' Then I began to funk again at his knowing that: perhaps he only guessed it after all: but at the time I thought he knew it; I was flustered, ye see. But I said, 'I'd look at the books; but I didn't think his deposit was anything like that.' 'You little equivocating humbug,' says he: 'and which was better, to tell the truths at once and let Captain Dodd, who never did me any harm, have his own, or to hear it told me in the felon's dock?' Those were his words, sir: and they made my blood run cold; and if he had gone on at me like that, I should have split, I know I should: but he just said, 'There, your face has given your tongue the lie: you haven't brains enough to play the rogue.' Oh, and another thing—he said he wouldn't talk to the sparrow-hawk any more, when there was the kite hard by: so by that I guess your turn is coming, sir; so mind your eye. And then he turned his back on me with a look as if I was so much dirt. But I didn't mind that; I was glad to be shut of him at any price.”