“And fall blinded for life or dead or dying while we walk off with the swag.”
“Blind, dead, dying! give me your hand. How? how? how?”
“Hush! don't shout like that; come closer, and you, Smith.”
Then a diabolical scheme hissed into the listeners' ears—a scheme at once cowardly and savage—a scheme of that terrible kind that robs courage, strength and even skill of their natural advantages, and reduces their owners to the level of the weak and the timid—a scheme worthy of the assassin of Carlo, and the name I have given this wretch, whose brain was so fertile and his heart so fiendish. Its effect on the hearers was great, but very different. Crawley recoiled, not violently, but like a serpent on which water had been poured; but brutus broke into a rapture of admiration, exultation, gratified hate.
“Bless you, bless you!” cried he, with a violence more horrible than his curses, “you warm my heart, you are a pal. What a head-piece you have got! —— you, Smith, have you nothing to say? Isn't this a dodge out of the common?”
Now for the last minute or two Crawley's eyes had been fixed with a haggard expression on a distant corner of the room. He did not move them; he appeared hardly to have the power, but he answered, dropping the words down on the table anywhere.
“Ye-yes! it is very inge-nious, ah!”
mephisto. “We must buy the turpentine directly; there is only one store sells it, and that shuts at nine.”
brutus. “Do you hear, Smith? hand us out the blunt.”
Crawley. “Oh, ugh!” and his eyes seemed fascinated to that spot.