“Whew!” Bernard whistled.
“There is Lady Day coming, and I can pay you then—most assuredly.” And an asseveration or two was beginning.
“Twenty pounds don’t fly promiscuously about the country,” muttered Bernard, chiefly for the sake of giving himself time.
“But I tell you I shall have a quarter from the works, and a quarter from my father (with his hand to his head). That’s—that’s—. Awful skinflints both of them! How is a man to do, so cramped up as that?”
“Oh! and how is a man to do if he spends it all beforehand?”
“I tell you, Bernard, I must have it, or—or it will break my mother’s heart! And as to my father, I’d—I’d cut my throat—I’d go to sea before he knew! Advance it to me, Bear! You know what it is to be in an awful scrape. Get me through this once and I’ll never—”
Bernard did not observe that the scrape of his boyhood over the drowned Stingo had hardly been of the magnitude that besought for twenty pounds. He waived the personal appeal, and asked, “What is the scrape?”
“Why, that intolerable swindler and ruffian, Hart, deceived me about Racket, and—”
“A horse at Avoncester?” said Bernard, light beginning to dawn on him.
“I made sure it was the only way out of it all, and they said Racket was as sure as death, and now the brute has come in third. Hart swears there was foul play, but what’s that to me? I’m done for unless you will help me over.”